The Blog
12 Apr 2004 Imagine a web site that holds photographs of every street number in London. Each picture would be uploaded by the general public using camphones. The system would hold a history of photos. It would be searchable by postcode or street name and street number in the style of Streetmap.co.uk. Attached to each photo would be a Wiki style page where people could leave comments and reviews. When you're going somewhere new, you could get a map from streetmap and visit this site to see what #23 actually looks like. If you were using a Wifi or GPRS connected PDA, you could look at the reviews and pictures while deciding whether to go in.
This is a lazyweb request where I'm not going to build it but I think it ought to exist. There's obviously lots of wrinkles to work out and a business plan to build behind it. The UI would need lots of work to make it fast and easy to use. There'd need to be quite a lot of storage and bandwidth available. The big trick would be to make it self-correcting rather than involve moderators and editors. And I can't see any reason why it shouldn't be exended to cover the whole UK based on postcode and street number. Does anyone want to try and build a proof of concept? Does it already exist and I just haven't heard of it? This is a repost of an old weblog of mine that brought up The Open Guide to London The difference now is that there are a *lot* more cameraphones around. [from: JB Ecademy] [ 12-Apr-04 1:40pm ] 09 Apr 2004 NotCon04 - Call for papers : NotCon '04, Sunday 6th June 2004, Imperial College Union, London http://www.notcon04.com/ Proposals due by: Friday 14th May 2004 Have you coded, created, or discovered an interesting application of technology? Then why not come and talk about it at NOTCON '04? NOTCON '04 is an informal, low-cost, one-day conference looking at things that technologies were perhaps not intended to do. [from: JB Ecademy]
[ 09-Apr-04 3:40pm ] 08 Apr 2004 Combine OPL for Series 60 phones[1] with FOAF and get real world matching via Bluetooth proximity of cellphones. Now imagine being at an Ecademy Event. You've loaded your profile onto your phone. You arrive and your phone makes contact with the people like you and your friends who are already there.
This should get built. It's just way too cool to stay as a research project. [1]OPL is effectively visual basic for phones. It's an open source scripting language that makes it relatively easy to write applications. It works with any Series 60 phone. It's dramatically dropped the barriers to entry for hone programming. [from: JB Ecademy] 07 Apr 2004 Just got this from Google.
------------------------------------ Thank you for your note. Google Web APIs include search, cached page lookup, and spelling. Google News is not currently accessible through this service. We are however gathering ideas for other useful APIs to export and very much appreciate your input. Regards, The Google Team Original Message Follows: ------------------------ From: Julian Bond Subject: New APIs Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2004 08:16:53 +0100 Where's the APIs for the other parts of Google? Especially Google News. [ 07-Apr-04 7:31pm ] If anyone here is interested in the science of social and business networking as opposed to actually doing it, I've added a new topic in DailEnews on "Business and Social Networking". I'd also recommend joining the Social Software and Social Capital club.
This is a relatively new but rapidly expanding field, so there's lots of analysis, research and ideas to be done and thought up. I can also recommend these sites:- Corante: Social Software Online Business Networks Blog The Social Software Weblog [from: JB Ecademy] Today is "Post a club message day"
 Go and have a look at your "My Clubs" page and post something to as many as you can manage. This is particularly important for Club Owners. Can you re-awaken your dormant clubs? [from: JB Ecademy] 05 Apr 2004 In Oct 2002, I saw Google News Beta and being an RSS junkie thought "I want some of that". I emailed news-feedback asking for RSS Output and got no reaction. So I hacked, cut and pasted some scraping code and produced gnews2rss.php and started using it to feed my personal aggregator. I made the source public domain and encouraged people to use it, host it themselves and hack it on further. I got really burnt on bandwidth costs by doing the same thing for blogger before they had RSS, so twice a month I insert a dummy item telling people to host it themselves and to email Google asking for RSS from News. About 6 months ago I started including gnews2rss feeds in Ecademy and waited for the Google complaint. It's finally arrived so the feeds have gone from Ecademy. Google have never asked me to remove gnews2rss, only to stop republishing the data on the web.
Now, Google is heading into an IPO and needs to be seen to enforce their T&Cs. I have no problem with that. I was playing fast and loose with their terms and now I've had my knuckles rapped. But the underlying problems remain. - No Ads on Google News. So what's the problem? - Google News still in beta. Why? - Google API is unchanged since launch and still only covers the main search. Where's the API for images, news, groups, froogle? - No metadata or XML/RDF output from any of their systems apart from Blogger. And when the Blogger people finally do syndication (now that Google has removed the bandwidth objection) the Blogger people choose Atom. Why? Is it just lack of programming resource? Perhaps the people who might spend their 20% private programming time on this aren't interested in metadata? Meanwhile Yahoo has the MyYahoo aggregator and RSS from news search. So I've just switched to Yahoo! news for the websites. Right now though, Google news search is still superior so for my own personal use I continue to use gnews2rss. So instead of (or as well as) arguing here, can I ask you all to email Google news feedback and ask for RSS/Atom output? The API was a great start and won them a lot of geekie kudos. But they've dropped the ball. Yahoo! has pretty much everything now that Google has and in some cases more. It's just that the quality is not quite as good. That's a pretty slim margin for Google to base themselves on. This story has been covered here. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/syndication/message/4405 http://www.boingboing.net/2004/04/02/google_news_which_sc.html http://battellemedia.com/archives/000533.php http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/3334651 http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2004_04_02.html#006729 http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/entry/6450235144623213/ http://blogs.it/0100198/2004/03/30.html#a2486 http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/04/02/ten-words http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=04/04/05/1244428 http://archive.scripting.com/2004/04/13#When:4:12:14AM 02 Apr 2004 Nick Denton's blog of blogs :: AO known as Kinja.
This is a pretty easy to use tool to read the contents of large numbers of blogs. Beware though. It will suck you in to hours and hours of random searching. It's another example of what I've come to think of as Blogs as productivity reducers. They are a actually a vast conspiracy to stop westerners doing any work by giving them more content than they can cope with. to give you some idea of the growth. Here's David Sifry at Technorati. http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000342.html At 4:35AM PST today, Technorati broke the 2 Million weblogs tracked milestone. The blogosphere continues to expand at an amazing pace, with about 12,000 new weblogs being created every day. We're tracking over 150,000 weblog updates every day, and growing. One of the reasons for this has been the substantial growth in hosted weblog systems like Typepad, LiveJournal, and Blogger, but also a tremendous amount of growth in smaller systems, like EasyJournal and Suicide Girls and moblogs like TextAmerica. Blogging is also growing outside of the United States and the English-speaking Internet, as we've seen lots of growth in non-English language weblogs as well, especially in Russian, French, Portuguese, Chinese, and Farsi. [from: JB Ecademy] [ 02-Apr-04 8:40am ] My run in with Google over RSS has made the papers. http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/3334651
It's mostly accurate... Also here. http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/entry/6450235144623213/ [ 02-Apr-04 8:07am ] 01 Apr 2004 Google to offer gigabyte of free e-mail - News - ZDNet Google has announced a test of a rival to Hotmail and other web mail systems. The hook is that they give you a large amount of storage so you can leave your old mail up there where you can then use Google's advanced search to find old entries.
All the major news outlets have picked up on this. There's even a press release. Maybe someone should remind them what day it is? Or is the joke on me? [from: JB Ecademy] We're starting to see mutterings about VoIP phones that have a built in WiFi connection like the Vonage's WiFi phone - Engadget - www.engadget.com
This is an idea who's time has come as providing you can find an open hotspot you can make cheap or free phone calls. The problem is authentication. How do you get past the typical splash sign on screen when you're device doesn't have a browser? [from: JB Wifi] [ 01-Apr-04 8:40am ] 30 Mar 2004 Bob Frankston and his three newly proposed YASNS — EomE [Enemy of my Enemies,] Blind Trust Network, and the Mindless Philatelist Network:
Brilliant! Enemy of my Enemies is a new social network. Unlike the old ones it focuses on the real need to protect ourselves from “themâ€. The Trust Network is the new effort to solve the problem of trust on the Internet. You can simple check a box to say you trust me. The Mindless Philatelist Network. This is the network for people who don’t really care what they collect as long as they have the most. So do you recognise any of these on Ecademy? [from: JB Ecademy] 26 Mar 2004 Times Online - Britain : THE British music industry is getting personal with millions of internet freeloaders who are threatening to bleed the business dry within a decade.
More than seven million Britons download music from illicit websites, according to figures released yesterday, a scale of piracy that the £5 billion industry cannot possibly sustain. To counteract this the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) is introducing American-style "strong-arm" tactics that include court action against thousands of home computer users. Even children could be targeted for breach of copyright. Peter Jamieson, the BPI chairman, said that the British music industry could become obsolete within a decade if the internet continued to offer an "anarchistic free-for-all". He blamed illegal downloads for a 59 per cent collapse in spending on singles last year. Users found to have made available more than 10,000 music files could, in theory, face claims for lost earnings by artists and record companies of up to £500,000. Fans could face jail if they refuse to pay. So it looks like the UK BPI are following in the footsteps of the RIAA and planning to sue their customers. Unfortunately the article is full of the usual half truths. - (the spread of broadband) will allow whole albums and cinema-quality feature films to be downloaded in minutes. Right. - He blamed illegal downloads for a 59 per cent collapse in spending on singles last year. WH Smiths stopping selling CD singles has nothing to do with it, then. - The BPI is convinced that entire musical genres will then disappear, and that record companies will have to focus their resources on a small number of commercially successful artists and drop others. Well that's certainly one business approach. Then we have the statistics from the BPI study. FOR THE RECORD # 18 per cent of UK people aged 12 to 74 — 8 million people — claim to be downloading music # Of this 8 million, 92 per cent are downloading from illegal sources # 47 per cent of downloaders aged 19 and under claim to be downloading more than ten tracks a month # At 3pm on March 24 more than 2.6 million people were logged on to KaZaa, sharing more than 630 million files # Spending on singles dropped by 59 per cent in 2003 and album spending by 33 per cent since 2002 # Heavy downloaders (ten tracks per month) spent 48 per cent less on buying music # 22 per cent of non-downloaders expressed intention to begin # 14 per cent stated intention to download full albums through broadband (5 million UK homes will be connected in 2005) # 375 million recordable CDs will be sold in UK in 2004, most to make illicit recordings Without getting into the moral arguments, if you use file sharing you would be well advised to read the EFF article on How Not To Get Sued By The RIAA For File-Sharing (And Other Ideas to Avoid Being Treated Like a Criminal). The key one is to turn off file sharing/allow uploads and don't make your copy of Kazaa a Supernode. At the end of all this, I'm surprised we don't hear more about the BPI and RIAA going after the real pirates who produce copies of physical CDs in bulk. I've certainly seen figures that suggest that this loss of revenue vastly outways file sharing on the net. And it's real lost revenue as people are paying for real product. More here on The Register who makes this point. The organisation points to filesharing as the cause of falling record sales. It says spending both on albums and on singles have fallen in the last 12 months, by 32 per cent and 59 per cent respectively. It is hard to imagine that filesharing has had no effect on sales of music, but it is also a bit much to expect us to believe it is the sole cause of this decline. The vast majority of downloading is track-led, and few people download whole albums. Also it is worth noting that it quotes spending as falling, not units sold. In fact, singles sales have been taking a hammering for sometime, and the BPI itself points out that the price of albums has fallen noticeably recently, with half of all CDs sold costing less than £10. [from: JB Ecademy] 25 Mar 2004 I suspect I'm not alone here in having a child who's doing A levels now and who will be looking for a gap year job in July/August for 6-9 months before University. The difference is that I've got two!
So can anyone help place them? They're a girl and a boy, intending to do History of Art and Engineering, bright, intelligent and reasonably responsible. We're living just North of London so anything in N-Central London would do. Needless to say they haven't a clue what they want to do but can turn their hand to most things or at least make the tea. money is important (isn't it always) but they're cheap. If you can help, drop me a line. [from: JB Ecademy] [ 25-Mar-04 3:10pm ] Techdirt Corporate Intelligence: Techdirt Wireless How Do You Say Hi To Someone On Your WiFi? : Well, I'm glad I'm not the only one who has thought about this idea. Danny O'Brien has his WiFi connection left open at his house. Despite all the fear mongering about such things, O'Brien has been careful to make sure that any important data is secured - and he's happy to let anyone close enough to his house share in the WiFi bandwidth goodness. He discovered that at least someone is using it, when he noticed he was sharing his iTunes collection via Rendezvous. So, now, he's wondering how can he contact the guy who's using his WiFi.
The only thing I do is to include my street address in my SSID. I'd really like to see AP manufacturers include a simple NoCat splash page into their systems. It seems to me that we ought to provide facilities to deliberately share our connection as well as providing the tools to lock it down. The current consumer grade APs are also woefully short of logging tools to track who's actually using the system. [from: JB Wifi] 24 Mar 2004 Unofficial YASN[1] gathering, Smiths in Smithfield. Thursday 25th March. 6pm onwards.
It's not official. There's no reason for it. It's just an excuse to meet people from Ecademy, Tribe, Orkut and R*ze and have a drink with them after work. See you there. [1]YASN = Yet Another Social Network [from: JB Ecademy] [ 24-Mar-04 6:10pm ] For the 520 Ecademy pollsters who apparently don't know what RSS is, I give you Wired's RSS cheatsheet.
5 Ways to Get Hooked Up • Bloglines www.bloglines.com Runs on most browsers and PDAs. Free. • FeedDemon www.feeddemon.com Runs on most Windows operating systems. $29.95. • NewsGator www.newsgator.com Runs on top of Microsoft Outlook. $29. • PocketRSS www.atomicdb.com Runs on Pocket PC devices. $5. • My Yahoo! add.my.yahoo.com/rss Runs on most browsers. Free. [from: JB Ecademy] 22 Mar 2004 I've just produced a bunch of buttons that can be used to link to Ecademy on your site.
 http://www.ecademy.com/images/logos/ecad_80_15a.gif http://www.ecademy.com/images/logos/ecad_80_15b.gif http://www.ecademy.com/images/logos/ecad_80_15c.gif http://www.ecademy.com/images/logos/ecad_80_15d.gif http://www.ecademy.com/images/logos/ecad_80_15e.gif http://www.ecademy.com/images/logos/ecad_80_15f.gifIf you want to fiddle with these, try the button maker. Send me the results and I'll include them here. To include a button on your site use these html snippets, changing the 9999s to your Ecademy ID number and change the image URL to one of the above. This links to your profile page.  Or use this one to link to the home page. Although I've included full URLs to the image on the ecademy webserver, I'd obviously prefer that you copy the image and host it yourself. [from: JB Ecademy] [ 22-Mar-04 1:40pm ] 19 Mar 2004 FrontPage - mySociety.org Wiki : mySociety has been awarded £250,000!
The 5 projects are Civic Democratic Renewal Nice to see the system paying people to poke it with a stick! The money came from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister's "e-Innovations" initiative. [from: JB Ecademy] [ 19-Mar-04 7:40pm ] 
  1 to 20 of 3860 |