We've just made some changes to the meetings system and in the process pensioned off the Events system.

Club meetings are now tied to the club that they belong to. If you run a club and have meetings setup, please edit the meeting and set it to "Ecademy Club Meeting" and set the club it belongs to. Clicking on Meetings on club pages then shows just meetings for that club.

Club, Ecademy Events and meetings you are attending are identified in the meeting lists by a gif to make them stand out.

Meetings can be set to auto-remind attendees by email. In addition the meeting organiser can email all attendees to warn of changes or cancellations

A CSV download of attendees is available to organisers to print labels or attendee lists

A "Print" option is available with a printable page(s) of meeting details and photos of attendees

If you include a postcode with the venue details a map link is automatically created for UK and USA

Meetings are auto-filtered to only show meetings in your country.

Any problems, drop me a line. [from: JB Wifi]

BurnhamsBeat: Social Networking: Partying Like It's 1999 is a VC's take on Social Networking sites. Ecademy got mentioned but he didn't "get" what we're doing. [from: JB Wifi]

I've come across a suggestion for embedding an IM system in Ecademy. Probably Jabber. the problem is that I can't work out what the benefit would be.

Any ideas on what we'd do with an embedded Jabber server? [from: JB Wifi]

We've just made some changes to the meetings system and in the process pensioned off the Events system.

Club meetings are now tied to the club that they belong to. If you run a club and have meetings setup, please edit the meeting and set it to "Ecademy Club Meeting" and set the club it belongs to. Clicking on Meetings on club pages then shows just meetings for that club.

Club, Ecademy Events and meetings you are attending are identified in the meeting lists by a gif to make them stand out.

Meetings can be set to auto-remind attendees by email. In addition the meeting organiser can email all attendees to warn of changes or cancellations

A CSV download of attendees is available to organisers to print labels or attendee lists

A "Print" option is available with a printable page(s) of meeting details and photos of attendees

If you include a postcode with the venue details a map link is automatically created for UK and USA

Meetings are auto-filtered to only show meetings in your country.

Any problems, drop me a line. [from: JB Ecademy]

I've come across a suggestion for embedding an IM system in Ecademy. Probably Jabber. the problem is that I can't work out what the benefit would be.

Any ideas on what we'd do with an embedded Jabber server? [from: JB Ecademy]

BurnhamsBeat: Social Networking: Partying Like It's 1999 is a VC's take on Social Networking sites. Ecademy got mentioned but he didn't "get" what we're doing. [from: JB Ecademy]

Plink have now got a Mobile (SMS) Service. So you can retrieve biographical and some contact information via an SMS call. This is a clever link between SMS and existing data. And another reason to turn FOAF export on from Ecademy so your details are in Plink.

What with Plink, Local-News and AnyRSS, Dom Ramsey is doing some interesting stuff. Somebody give him a job! [from: JB Ecademy]

Further to my blog about Downing Street Says Just got a note from Tom Steinberg who says,

Thanks for the coverage of our new site, but I must make clear that Publicwhip.org.uk is the work of Francis Irving, and FaxYourMP is the work of James Cronin, Tom Loosemore and others. Furthermore, other than suggesting the logo and some of the ideas, none of the work on www.downingstreetsays.com was mine at all - I just help bring it all together. [from: JB Ecademy]

Downing Street Says... is a blog from Tom Steinberg that takes Downing St press briefings and turns them into a quickly readable form. Tom is the guy behind other UK projects like FaxYourMP and Public Whip. As he says "Keep poking the system with a stick".

[from: JB Ecademy]

ZDNet UK - News - EU delays vote on 'Euro-DMCA' : A vote on the EU's proposed directive on the enforcement of intellectual property rights, which has been compared to a draconian US law, has been pushed back to November. This week's European Parliament vote on a proposed law aimed at cracking down on piracy has been delayed until November, amid criticism that its implementation would criminalise many innocuous activities and harm European competition.

This is a glorious can of worms. The BSA ("Promoting a safe and legal world") put together a proposal. They pass it to Janelly Fourtou MEP (google cache) who is coincidentally the husband of Jean-René Fourtou, former top manager of Aventis (pharma), and currently the CEO of Vivendi Universal. Vivendi is involved in cooperation negotiations with Microsoft. She turns it into a directive to the EU and presents it as "harmonising the status quo". So no conflict of interest there then.

There's more on this story in ZDNet, and The Times. To get a feel for what's going on here, consider these words from David Rowan:-

"Because the directive does not define the scope of “intellectual property rights”, it could theoretically let EU states jail millions of ordinary consumers who swap song files, scan photographs or play copy-protected CDs on their PCs. As critics such as the Electronic Freedom Foundation have calculated, anyone who unwittingly infringes copyright — even if it has no effect on the market — could potentially have their assets seized, bank accounts frozen and home searched.

It is easy to see how the proposed sanctions will be used to strike fear in ordinary consumers and legitimate small businesses. There will be well-publicised raids on file-swappers’ homes, without any prior court hearing. Academics who question the security of commercial software will find themselves accused of breaching the owners’ rights. Free-software groups will face legal challenges from larger firms based on unwarranted intellectual-property claims. And over time competition, and consumer rights, will be further whittled away.

Copyright is never an easy subject to get people excited about. But if you do not welcome the idea of a British DMCA, tell your MEP before the vote." [from: JB Ecademy]

WAP, Avantgo Hotspot Directory - )( JiWire - your guide to wi-fi

I've just installed the localcopy of the JiWire hotspot directory. Which neatly gets round the problem of needing to get online to find the nearest hotspot so you can get online.

It also seems to be able to find hotspots based on the first part of a UK postcode which the web version can't manage yet. [from: JB Wifi]

= openBC = is Yet Another Social Network. This time in Germany but bilingual with English. Could be sueful for people wanting to do business in Germany. [from: JB Ecademy]

A bit of fun I knocked up last night. An Ecademy People Collage. It updates every 60 seconds. Click on a picture and it launches the profile page for that person.

The underlying image is collage.jpg. I'm sure someone can work out how to turn it into a screensaver or desktop. [from: JB Ecademy]

Do you get depressed by how bad all the news is? Well for a change, here's some good news.

Goodle Good News [from: JB Ecademy]

Call centers being opened in US prisons "employing" inmates at $130 per week.

The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Companies take call centers to prison : "It's like bringing little islands of the Third World right here to the heartland of America," he said. "You get the same total control of the work force, the same low wages, and it does nothing for the inmates."

This is clearly an idea who's time has come. Take a country with the world's largest prison population. Add in a large dose of protectionism over the horror of white collar jobs being outsourced offshore. Season with the profit motive both for prison management and local corporations. And what do you get, "This is a niche where the prison industry could really help the U.S. economy," said Robert Killgore, director of Inside Oregon Enterprises, the quasi-state agency that recruits for-profit business to prisons.

With the high proportion of Afrcan-Americans in US prisons for drug related offences you do have to wonder about some of the support calls. Or is that last statement too politically incorrect? Similarly for the high proportion of Hispanics out on the West coast and in Florida. Perhaps the US could stem the flow of immigrants across the border by soaking up all the jobs taken by immigrant labour with low risk prisoners on day duty?

The more you think about this the more bizarre it becomes but at the same time entirely logical. The combination of "The War on Some Drugs", "Three strikes and you're out" and similar schemes, combined with for-profit prison management produces the perfect tool for increasing American corporate efficiency by reducing labour costs. While at the same time it keeps the underclass off the streets in a nice controlled environment.

Bwahhahahhahahahh! [from: JB Ecademy]

I think I've got one spare ticket to see Zen TV tonight. £20. If you're interested you'll have to pick it up between 8 and 8:30 outside the doors. Call me on +44 (0)77 5907 2173

Zen TV, Coldcut, AV/DJ Set, Hexstatic, Live, Kid Koala, Compere & DJ Set, Skalpel, DJ Set, Blockhead, DJ Set, DK, DJ Set, VJs - Lucky Cat & Juxta.
The Forum, Kentish Town, London
Doors open at 8pm
[from: JB Ecademy]

I've been passed a URL for the original piece of satire which has this disclaimer at the bottom.

Please note that this is a humor article and is not true in any way, shape or form, except in that it rings true in a scary way

More seriously, here's Orkut's previous work on SNs
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue8_6/adamic/
http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2003/marapr/farmreport/news.html
http://www.stanfordalumni.org/services/ext/incircle/login.html

Hello, hello. What's going on here then?

Yahoo! Groups : reputation Messages : Message 108 of 108 : Popular social website revealed as college experiment

Orkut.com users were starting to catch on

Posted Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2004 21:30 GMT

Mountain View, CA (HACT) -- Orkut.com, a popular social networking Website which has attracted the attention of the some of the Internet's biggest names, was revealed today by its creators to be an elaborate "reality Internet" project to form the basis of a master's thesis.

"We figured we couldn't keep it secret much longer anyway," said Orkut Buyukkokten, after whom the distinctive blue-colored meet-and-match site was named. "I didn't think we could do it this long in the first place, actually."

Commentary: Hot-spot security in hot water | Get Up to Speed Wi Fi Journal | CNET News.com

Yet more scare mongering about WiFi hotspots. This story suggest that it's possible for someone to setup a rogue hotspot near an official paid hotspot, force the user to connect to the rogue, display a fake sign in page and capture your credit card information. While this might be possible it sounds a great deal harder than dumpster diving for restaurant receipts.

The possibility of hijacking a session like this sounds more interesting for corporate espionage but again, why not just use a sniffer.

What seems to happen here is that the security people are constantly digging for exploits. They issue a press release which then gets picked up by a hack and turned into yet another shock horror article. I do wish this could be accompanied with some basic threat analysis and some comment made on how dangerous the exploit is. All we ever seem to get is "Shock Horror: Because of WiFi, All Your Secrets Are Belong To Us". [from: JB Wifi]

At last InfoWorld: T-Mobile pushes international, 'seamless' Wi-Fi services: February 25, 2004: By : Wireless

Buy a subscription to T-Mobile in any participating country and use the same account in any other. [from: JB Wifi]