The Blog
28 Jan 2004 Here's a few use-cases to do with linking SNs and other sites.
1) Alice signs up to a new site. She tells the site to get her details from her Personal Identity Server URL(PIS). The site gets a profile file in XML(RDF) from the URL and populates a new user record. It also gets a list of "Friends" identified by a hashed email address. It looks for existing users with the same hash and builds an initial network in the site for her record. 2) Bob tells a site to use authentication from a managed Personal Identity Service he uses. It redirects to the PIS login form. This authenticates him and then redirects back to the site. Tokens (nonces) are passed back and forth, and Bob is now logged in on the site. He's going away for 2 weeks skiing so he logs out on the PIS service and is automatically logged out of the 50 sites that use the service. 3) Carol uses an SN site for a while and builds up a big network and lots of profile data. The site passes the data back to her PIS where it updates her profile and merges with the standard data she maintains. So new data is mirrored and synced between her personal store and the SN site. 4) Dave posts entries on 25 sites at various times. His personal weblog picks up all these posts and presents them as an aggregate blog automatically with links back to the originals. this drives traffic in both directions and increases pagerank for all concerned. 5) SNorati, aggregates both FOAF and RSS data from multiple sources including synthetic data derived from posting habits on IRC, Usenet and mailing lists. It's building a searchable map of the most active networkers on the planet. Within weeks, it's aggregated 2 million identities growing at 100,000 per day and accelerating. People say it's amazingly useful but so slow as to be unusable. 6) RateMyFoaf.com proves stupidly popular. It grows extremely rapidly before getting slashdotted and blogdexed resulting in a huge bandwidth bill for it's student owner. 7) Bill and Miriam create a Perl based Personal Identity Server that requires only FTP and CGI access called "Fixed Class". In parallel they set up a managed hosted version supported by subscriptions. Matt duplicates and extends the code using Python. phpPIS is started on Sourceforge. Fixed Class compatible code is built into Drupal to act as both a PIS Server and Client and gets implemented in Deanspace. phpBB and phpNuke quickly follow suit. Blogger and Livejournal announce support for the Fixed Class protocols. Ryze and Ecademy support it, while Tribes, LinkedIn, Friendster, Spoke, Plaxo, Orkut refuse to comment. A huge flame war breaks out when Andy, Simon and Matt start a Wiki to produce a pure XML version that is incompatible. A consortium of companies including Intel, EDS and Ford produce a hugely complex industrial-strength version that only gets one customer and that's Amex. Microsoft announces PSI.NET which is Passport compatible and available 1st qtr 2007. Early betas seem to have major security holes and the code requires Longhorn AS and Exchange 2005. So. Is this blowing in the wind? Is the problem actually annoying enough that developers will want to scratch this itch? Are the use-cases strong enough or is this just a non-problem? [ 28-Jan-04 5:27pm ] It must be a political day today as this my third post on political issues. Our World Our Say is a petition campaign in the UK calling for a full judicial inquiry into whether Parliament and the British people were misled over the threat from Iraq. [from: JB Ecademy]
[ 28-Jan-04 4:10pm ] Slick little flash animation from Ben Cohen explains how a little off the top of the US military budget could solve world hunger among other things. [from: JB Ecademy]
Higher Education Bill - 27 Jan 2004 - Division No. 38 - Public Whip is an analysis of MPs voting in yesterday's tuition fees debate. How did your MP vote? Do you agree with them? How will you tell them? [from: JB Ecademy]
26 Jan 2004 Jan 26 - Feb 1 BT Openzone - Free Wireless Broadband Week. Looks fairly simple. There's a one page registration form after which you get an ID+Password. You have to give your postcode, phone number and email. I'll see later what the experience is like in a hotspot. [from: JB Wifi]
[ 26-Jan-04 8:40am ] WSJ.com - InterContinental to Offer Free High-Speed Internet Holiday Inn, Best Western, Marriott have all announced free internet access (a mix of wired and Wifi) in their mid and low priced hotels in the USA. It seems that this is just another cost of doing business and attracting business customers. Inevitably, at the top end of the range it's still charged, but their moving to a flat fee for unlimited net and phone.
It'll be interesting to see how much of this filters over to the UK and elsewhere. [from: JB Wifi] [ 26-Jan-04 8:40am ] 25 Jan 2004 The Mysociety project is an attempt to come up with low cost high value internet projects for UK Politics. This one looks interesting.
YourConstituencyMailingList - mySociety.org Wiki : The User's View 1) User enters postcode (zipcode) & email address. 2) Site IDs their MP. 3) If their MP is already using a mailing list, they are added. If not, they are added to a 'waiting list' database. The MP is email notified when 10, 50, 100, 500 users have signed up as interested. 4) MPs are allowed to post simply by emailing a secure address (i.e. ds78fd78gfd@mpmail.com). Their email goes to an announcement list. 5) Reply to all is disabled - BUT every email they send has a custom URL at the bottom. It links to an auto-created forum thread where the first post is a copy of the email. Then anyone can respond via the forum thread. I can imagine constituents wanting to talk to each other. I find it harder to imagine MPs getting involved as well. [from: JB Ecademy] [ 25-Jan-04 6:40pm ] I got a call a couple of days ago from someone who wanted to offer free WiFi internet access in a couple of Cafe-Restaurants on the South Bank in London-UK. I realized that I really haven't a clue about what to recommend or who to ask. so:-
- What should they do? - Who should they ask? - What regs will they have to comply with? - What hardware/software should they buy? - Where should they go and what will they need for backhaul bandwidth? [from: JB Wifi] 24 Jan 2004 23 Jan 2004 Jeremy Zawodny's blog: My Yahoo! RSS Beta Launched
If you're a Yahoo user, you can now add RSS feeds to your MyYahoo! page. Now Ecademy generates lots of RSS so you can add Ecademy headlines to your MyYahoo! page. Just copy the link from the  glyphs and paste it into the form here. [from: JB Ecademy]O'Reilly Network: Wireless Mesh Networking [Jan. 22, 2004] is a summary and overview of open standards for mesh networking. Unfortunately it glosses over what is probably the biggest issue with Mesh, which is IP allocation to mesh nodes.
With Mesh used to provide Internet access we've introduced another layer at the edge of the network. So we have:- - Internet - ISP gateway - Mesh Nodes - Home Gateways - Home Clients The problem is how we assign IP addresses to the mesh nodes and home gateways. And we really need to do it in a global way so that when we add more nodes or merge meshes, we don't get IP number collisions. As Locustworld and others have discovered it's pretty much impossible to get a block of addresses to use. In theory, the answer is to use IPv6 but amazingly it's very difficult for a small organization or not-for-profit to get a block of IPv6 addresses. So now you're forced back into using NAT on the edge between the ISP and the mesh and using local 10.x.x.x numbers. But now there's no global control to avoid clashes and the home client is almosty certainly going to go through two NAT gateways to get to the internet. And all this is before we ever get to issues of making the mesh routing work or thnking about what business case there is for mesh in the first place. The big players like Intel and others have now started a group in the IEEE to try and come up with some Mesh standards at the Wireless level. But I don't see any evidence of people trying to solve the IP address problem. The real solution here is for IPv6 to be used at the edge and to have a clear and cheap/free method of global allocation. Then we can go back to the idea of everything connected to the Internet being globally addressable and get rid of NAT once and for all. just don't hold your breath! [from: JB Wifi] 22 Jan 2004 Findory.com News: Personalized News is a very curious site. It's as close as anything I've seen yet to "The Daily Me". It adjusts the list of articles shown according to which articles you click on to "read more". All this is done without a login and via a tracking cookie, although yu can login so that you can use the site at multiple or public computers.
My concern is that inevitably it doesn't yet have a wide enough set of sources; it's quite US biased; and sport=basketball. Now if I could just get this via RSS... [Updated to add] The parent website, is Memigo. They do something very similar (the databases may be linked) and have customised RSS feeds. [from: JB Ecademy] [ 22-Jan-04 1:43pm ] Has anyone got experience of hooking a Linksys/Netgear/Belkin Router-AP-Hub to BT Broadband? I'm curious to know what problems you had, where you got your ADSL->Ethernet modem and how you coped with BT's authentication (PPPOA?). [from: JB Wifi]
[ 22-Jan-04 1:42pm ] I seem to be repeatedly hearing people asking how to get a bit more range from their home access point or needing to get through a couple more walls in an old house. So here's a post about the simplest possible solution.
http://www.freeantennas.com/projects/Ez-10/ Simple antenna enhancers that you can make with card, scissors, foil and glue (not to mention sticky back plastic or detergent bottles). They're easy to make and they work. Stick these on your access point and the client laptops will get better signal. [from: JB Wifi] [ 22-Jan-04 1:42pm ] 16 Jan 2004 Yes! Another get your war on.
www.mnftiu.cc | get your war on | page thirty "You know, I remember when I was worried the war in Iraq would distract us from rebuilding Afghanistan. (Thank god I was wrong about that!). Today I literally asked myself, Are we gonna get distracted from rebuilding Iraq, because of our mission to Mars?" [from: JB Ecademy] [ 16-Jan-04 9:10am ] 15 Jan 2004 Contrast
Wired News: Britain Steps Up (anti)Piracy Campaign The British music industry will sue Internet song swappers unless they stop putting their music collection online for others to download, a top British music official said Tuesday. with UK album sales 'reach new high' : Album sales in the UK rose by 7.6% in 2003 to a record high, fuelled by falling CD prices - in spite of piracy fears, according to an industry report. and DRM: who needs it? UK label stands up for its customers Pioneer British electronic label Warp Records has struck a blow for computers users by making its entire back catalog available for download - unencumbered by the toxic DRM restrictions that the pigopolists insist on. The Sheffield label carries quite some commercial clout, as it's home to international draws such as The Aphex Twin, LFO, Boards of Canada, and the band currently topping US college station charts, Broadcast. Quick. Sue your customers. That'll work.  [from: JB Ecademy] [ 15-Jan-04 3:40pm ] So what happens when the Internet meets grass roots politics? In the UK? And which political party is going to start an internet driven grass roots campaign in the next UK election?
Steven ("Emergence") Johnson on Emergent Politics Can the World Wide Web give ordinary people a shot at true populism New UK Political party dotcom YourParty A BBC experiment in participation BBC's iCAN beta The official experiment in participation The Big Conversation How did your MP vote? Public Whip Get your MPs attention FaxYourMP.com Inventing new, cheap ways to involve the populace mySociety The MySociety Blog VoxPolitics. Dean For American UK Ex-Pats http://www.deanforamerica.org.uk/> And of course, Dean For America Official site Not to mention, The EcademyForDean club References Rodcorp Doc Searls [from: JB Ecademy] After £25m costs, ministers click off UK Online
The research shows that far from turning to the internet in their droves and using technology to improve productivity, Britain’s small and medium-sized businesses are “clicking off.” What's a little curious about this is their definition of "Use the internet". So how should SMEs be exploiting the internet? [from: JB Beyond Bricks] 13 Jan 2004 Has anyone else used the more advanced features of the Amazon UK Recommendation system? In theory you should be able to go to your recommendations, mark that you own items and rate them. In theory, items that are marked as owned then get removed from the list and the list is updated with the new information. This has certainly worked in the past as I went though the books system and had to mark 40 books before it started recommending things I didn't own.
For the last few weeks however, it looks like the "Save" and "I Own it" buttons don't work. No matter how many times I tell it I own something and rate it, the item never disappears from the list. It's as though there's a back end database problem and my responses are not being saved. So I reported this through the Amazon help system and got a stock reply that just quotes their help about how to use recommendations. So I replied telling them to read my words and got more stock help text. I've now gone round this cycle 6 times. I tell them exactly what the problem is, I get an apparently personalised response that just repeats text out of the help. Judging by the names on the emails, Amazon.co.uk have outsourced their support system to India. Which leads me to another corrolary of Clarke's Law. "Any sufficiently stupid help desk is indistinguishable from a robot" [from: JB Ecademy] New Media Knowledge - Selling Social Software event presentations are on line. There's also some links to blog entries from both presenters and participants.
Worth reading if you follow this space. I'm also glad to see that we got a mention and that wikis and blogs were covered and not just Friendster. [from: JB Ecademy] 
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