Go ahead and vote here. How Many Social Networking Services Do You Actively Utilize? - The Social Software Weblog - socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com [from: JB Ecademy]

TheyWorkForYou.com: Is your MP working for you in Parliament? Here's Cory Doctorow's words about it.

TheyWorkForYou.com -- a project from the FaxYourMP team -- has launched today. This is the most amazing, subversive piece of political webware I've ever seen. It scrapes the Parliamentary record and makes the entire thing commentable, searchable and permalinkable. It compiles stats of which MPs vote against their parties most often, which ones speak most often, which have made the most motions and so forth. I've been beta-testing it and the code and UI are brilliant. It's like they've poured Parliament into LiveJournal -- and in so doing, have cutg overnment down to a human-addressable scale. We need one of these in every country in the world.

[from: JB Ecademy]

NotCon: golden age of the geekesque

What: NotCon '04 - an informal, low-cost, one-day conference on things that technologies were perhaps not intended to do.

When: 11am-7pm, Sunday June 6th, 2004.

Where: Imperial College Union, Beit Quad, Prince Consort Road, South Kensington SW7 2BB (nearest tubes South Kensington and Gloucester Road).

Cost: £4.00 on the door, £3.00 concessions (ie students, under 18s, journalists, OAPs, the unemployed, any webloggers not covered by one or more of the previous categories).

Also at http://www.xcom2002.com/nc04/

Be there, or be a real person with a life. [from: JB Ecademy]

Like OD2, iTunes, Sony, the new Napster or Allofmp3.com? What was your experience like?

I ask because the BPI has put out a press release that legal online downloading services are turning around the drop in industry revenues. It's the usual glossy half truths!

What you actually get is expensive, DRM protected, low quality, tracks. iTunes makes you jump through hoops to move your music from one device to another. Sony is in their own proprietary ATRAC 3 format so you have to use their software. And as for Napster in the UK, £1.09 per track + £0.99 per burn of the same track. They're havin a larf! I haven't tried OD2 so can't really comment.

Funny that nobody's mentioning allofmp3.com much since the initial burst of publicity. This is the real future of music distribution. $1 per CD, quality encoding (MP3 LAME -standard 192Kb vbr), accurate ID3 tags, no DRM. I've *bought* more music in the last 3 weeks from them than I have through normal channels in the last 3 months. I've spent more on downloads than I did on CDs. And I've stopped messing even with P2P programs like Soulseek as it's so much more convenient, fast and accurate. I really can't fault it.

One of these days maybe the labels will realize that the real problem with their sales is the price. Or maybe not. [from: JB Ecademy]

A thought from the weekend.

Google is very very good at only showing results in what it thinks is your native language. This means that if you speak English and do your search queries in English, you hardly ever see websites in other tongues. This then gives you a distorted view of reality as if the internet is exclusively English and predominantly from the USA. This is not true, even though the USA is still the biggest source of internet content.

So is Google giving us a distorted view of the web and hence of the world? I don't believe that's one of their goals, but it's a curious side effect of them being so good at giving the customer what they want.

There's probably a thesis in here as well about how it re-inforces provincial attitudes world wide but that's another story. [from: JB Ecademy]

I'm looking for a set of wiki code that runs on php, mysql and is going to be able to use an external user table for authentication. Can anyone recommend anything?

I've been trying to get phpWiki to work but without success. The changelog for 1.3.10 doesn't fill me with confidence. If you've got some experience of making phpWiki 1.3 work I'd like to talk.

Or should I just give up on php and start looking at perl wikis instead?

Please email me at julian.bond @ voidstar.com if you can help.

Are you a Photoshop expert who fancies a bit of fun work on the side? Are you generally anti the Bush/Blair Axis of Coalition? Then here's a fun little project for you.

Can you fade in Bush and Blair's faces onto this poster or one of the other copies out there on the web?



BTW, there's a new Get Your War On cartoon.
"Come on June 30th! Come on baby! Almost there!
"... Whatever. You know what it's gonna be like in Iraq on June 30th? It's gonna be hot and dusty"
"Maybe. But July 1st is gonna be AWESOME!"

There's a press release doing the rounds from a Harris Interactive Poll called "Kids know downloading music is illegal".

Now IANAL, but I certainly thought that there was nothing illegal in any jurisdiction against downloading. It was uploading and sharing that was (probably) illegal. Or is the BSA claiming that downloading software is the same as the offence of "receiving stolen goods"? If they are then why aren't they pressing charges on that basis? In the USA at least, all the law cases have been against people sharing large numbers of files, not those downloading large numbers of files. And I say "probably illegal" because to my knowledge no case has been brought to trial and so there's no case law anywhere to add weight to their claims.

Maybe I'm just arguing semantics here, but I'm getting really tired of the BSA, RIAA, MPAA and all the other dinosaur pigopolists equating
Fair use == Breaking DRM == Copying == Downloading == Sharing == Stealing

Wouldn't it be better and more accurate to title the article "Kids know sharing music is illegal". [from: JB Ecademy]

Kurt Vonnegut produces one of his wonderful essays that is so filled with sound bites, you almost miss the message. Cold Turkey -- In These Times :

I'll ruin it for you by just quoting the last two lines.

Here's what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.

And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we're hooked on. [from: JB Ecademy]

Help: I Got Hacked. Now What Do I Do? - Lockergnome's Tech News Watch :
So, you didn't patch the system and it got hacked. What to do? Well, let's see:
You can't clean a compromised system by patching it.
You can't clean a compromised system by removing the back doors.
You can't clean a compromised system by using some 'vulnerability remover'
You can't clean a compromised system by using a virus scanner.
You can't clean a compromised system by reinstalling the operating system over the existing installation.
You can't trust any data copied from a compromised system.
You can't trust the event logs on a compromised system.
You may not be able to trust your latest backup.
If you have a system that has been completely compromised, the only thing you can do is to flatten the system (reformat the system disk) and rebuild it from scratch (reinstall Windows and your applications).

This advice came from Microsoft Technet.

Are you scared yet? Maybe keeping up with the patches, not opening unknown attachments and not downloading and installing disreputable software is a better option.

Or you could stop using all those "free" Microsoft products and try some alternatives. [from: JB Ecademy]

Gosh!

Google Groups Beta 2 is now a direct competitor to yahoogroups. As well as Usenet:-
- You can now start mailing lists
- You can subscribe to usenet groups as if they were email mailing lists

And here's the kicker,
- Every group has one or more atom feeds.

http://groups-beta.google.com/
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/rec.motorcycles.racing
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/rec.motorcycles.racing/about
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/rec.motorcycles.racing/feeds
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/rec.motorcycles.racing/feed/msgs.xml
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/rec.motorcycles.racing/feed/topics.xml

Now where's the atom or rss feed from Google news, Froogle, Images?... [from: JB Ecademy]

I'm in the middle of trying to puzzle out a tricky programming problem. 15 minutes later I realized that I'd completely lost the plot when I had a Skype instant message, an MSN instant message, 3 incoming SMS and the phone rang.

That's it, the phone's off the hook, my cellphone is turned off, MSN and Skype are turned off. If you need to get in touch send me an email. I'll deal with it in my time not yours. Am I being too extreme? Oh dear, I see I've got another 20 emails where I'm on the cc: list but have no real interest in the content and those are buried in the 50 virus warnings and spam that all my filters didn't catch.

Seriously, how does anyone get anything done in this modern life? When I was in corporates you couldn't actually do any work for meetings. Now I'm working from home, I can't do any work for interruptions.

I don't know. I love all these new forms of communication just as long as I'm in control. But I'm beginning to really hate the ones that demand attention where it wasn't me that initiated the conversation. [from: JB Ecademy]

The display and sort of ratings on your network list on Ecademy has been broken for some time. Also the Friends of Friends list wasn't working right either. Well they're both now fixed and working the way they're supposed to.

A bit of clarification. Friends of Friends is a composite of everyone who knows you or knows someone you now. Is that everyone within 3 degrees of separation? As you'd expect if you know Thomas Power or one of the other top networkers, your FoF list will cover everyone who is anyone! [from: JB Ecademy]

For those of you who feel they need it, there are now two extra settings on the profile visibility controls.

- Hide from guests. This hides your profile from people who are visiting the website but are not logged in and hence probably not members of Ecademy.

- Hide from search engines. If the above setting is off (ie guests can see your profile), this inserts a command to tell the search engine not to index the page but to follow any links it finds. If your profile is hidden from guests, it's obviously also hidden from search engines.

Both settings default to off and hence to openness.

Just to clarify, you should assume that anything you post on Ecademy is visible to the world and to search engines. The exceptions are:-
- Profile detail under the control of the above visibility controls.
- The forum and membership of Private Clubs
- Network messages
- Meetings and attendance at meetings that are set to anything less than "Anyone". [from: JB Ecademy]

This is several emails stitched together so doesn't flow as well as it should. But I think it needed publishing.

At the height of the B2B period I did quite a lot of work on understanding conversations in terms of one-few-many to one-few-many so traditional publishing is one-to-many; most plain email is one-to-one; most blogs are one-to-few; mailing lists are few-to-few; and so on.

YASNs do answer some needs that are not currently provided elsewhere.

The key one is enabling initial one-to-one communication between people who don't know each other. The centralised system can provide a venue for this where the initial contact is at arms length and so "safe". Given that the this initial contact often leads quickly to traditional one-to-one methods like phones and email, it's only the initial contact that matters. It might be possible to de-centralise it but we'll have to do a lot more work on standard ways of anonymity, encryption and search. FOAF and Socialgrid deal with the search bit but assume that complete transparency is ok. It may be OK for geeks and self-publicists but it's not ok for everyone else.

The second one that Ryze, Tribes, Ecademy, Orkut, Yahoogroups, Meetup, and discussion boards answer is the need for few-to-few group communication. The Blog community is trying to bolt this onto a one-to- many system with comments and trackbacks and frankly it sucks. Trying to track and remain involved in group discussion that happens across multiple comments threads on multiple blogs really doesn't work very well. phpBB, Mailman and hosted sites like quicktopics or communityzero have dropped the barrier to entry and Yahoogroups has dropped it to zero as long as you can put up with the ads. For the YASNs that provide this feature it's been quite successful but it's quite hard to understand why when the implementations aren't very good compared with the dedicated systems. Also this area could really do with a good dedicated search engine.

The effects on monetizing YASNs

So YASNs and YABNs (Yet Another Business Network!) do fulfil some fairly basic needs in people. We're still on the first generation so most of them (including our own Ecademy) are fairly clunky. As I said above, These needs seem to revolve around three areas:-
- Personal Publishing: one to many communication
- Group Discussion: few to few communication
- Meeting people we don't know: one to one communication in a safe environment

If these needs are real and the YASNs are a real answer to them, then we'll find a way of monetizing it. If we go back a few years this is the same question as asking "How should eGroups/Hotmail make money?". The answer in that case was Yahoo!/Microsoft. And there's hundreds of answers only one of which is to take a skim on transactions. Here's a few.

- Advertising: VC poured scorn on this and continues to do so. And yet Google/Overture have made it work. If you can keep your costs down and sell the advertising cleverly, there's a nice little earner available. Eyeballs *are* worth money. Just not as much as we thought.

- Subscriptions for premium services: The churn may kill you but it does work. At least until the same offer is free elsewhere. Similarly for paid listings.

- Auctioning/selling associated product to corporates: The classic is Meetup selling aggregated customer attendance to venues.

My guess is that the current crop of heavily VC supported YASNs will flame out when they burn all their cash and then either disappear or be absorbed. Mainly because I don't think they can generate as much money as is needed to service the VC they've taken. In the shake out, maybe Barry Diller will buy them all for cents on the dollar. Or a big portal will spend silly money instead of writing and building their own. Which means we'll end up with a couple of large competitors where money is not an issue and a group of niche sites that are self sufficient but remain quite small.

The Decentralizing YASNs postscript.
There is another possibility. Someone will work out how to decentralise all the YASN function into a Movable Type style, free, open source project and there'll be a few million YASNs instead of 100. It might even be nothing more than a plugin for Movable Type/Typepad. This wouldn't kill the existing hosted services but it would reduce their ability to monetize significantly.

Really excellent speech to the World Economic forum about the future of entrepreneurial bsuiness in Europe. Here's the main points but I'd recommend reading the full text and watching the video.

Loic Le Meur Blog: Speech on the Future of Business in Europe Video :
1. Decrease the regulations in the EU and member Countries
-change the fiscal framework into an Entrepreneur friendly environment

2. Entrepreneurship
-improve the image of Entrepreneurs in Europe

3. Measure, gather and promote centers of excellence.
We need to focus on our successes and build Silicon Valleys of Europe all around the EU.

4. Education
-needs for an Education and training reform. EU students are some of the best educated in the world but they face obstacles becoming stars and innovators

5. Information Society as a priority

6. R&D and Innovation
-increase the budget for R&D, US is close to three times as more as ours [from: JB Ecademy]

AllOfMp3.com is an interesting approach to downloading music. and definitely worth checking out.

- Russian
- Legal (so far). They have distribution licenses for everything from Russian Organization for Multimedia and Digital Systems
- Any encoding at any bitrate from MP3 through to full CDA including Ogg, WMA
- No DRM. Copy the resulting files to whatever media you need on whatever machine you use.
- Streamed LoFi free samples for everything
- Big and growing library
- Pay per Mb of download. So if you go for high quality you pay more or get fewer songs.
- Payment via Paypal, direct credit card and a few others.
- 1 gigabyte costs $10. The costs are a mixture of $0.01 and $0.02 per Mb. So a full copy of a CD in original CDA format is approx $11.

Is this the future of music distribution? This is actually much more innovative than iTunes. I really can't see any downsides. Except maybe to the record companies getting less money than they hoped. [from: JB Ecademy]

Google News on Google IPO
Google's S-1
Slashdot

LIS News: "In the filing, Google said that it generated revenues of $961.9 million in 2003 and reported a net profit of $106.5 million. Sales rose 177 percent from a year ago although earnings increased by just 6 percent."

"They're doing a Dutch Auction IPO and want to earn $2.7B, although speculation puts this closer to $20B. The underwriters are Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston."

From the risks section: "The initial option grants to many of our senior management and key employees are fully vested. Therefore, these employees may not have sufficient financial incentive to stay with us.

Many of our senior management personnel and other key employees have become, or will soon become, substantially vested in their initial stock option grants. While we often grant additional stock options to management personnel and other key employees after their hire dates to provide additional incentives to remain employed by us, their initial grants are usually much larger than follow-on grants. Employees may be more likely to leave us after their initial option grant fully vests, especially if the shares underlying the options have significantly appreciated in value relative to the option exercise price. We have not given any additional grants to Eric, Larry or Sergey. Larry and Sergey are fully vested, and only a small portion of Eric’s stock is subject to future vesting. "

Dan Gillmor: As of March 31, the company had "1,907 employees, consisting of 596 in research and development, 961 in sales and marketing and 350 in general and administrative." [from: JB Ecademy]

1) What do you do if you're on a Mac? This was prompted by Glenn Fleishman.

2) How would you go about building a wiretap for VoIP. With VoIP that has a link into the Plain Old Telephone System (POTS) there's clearly a choke point that could use traditional wiretap techniques. But it's still made considerably harder by one side of the choke being internet based. Where the VoIP is between computers with no POTS, it's much harder as Voice is just another collection of packets mixed in with the web, email and so on. So that means building logging facilities that understand the protocols which themselves are evolving. The only available choke points are in the ISP so now we're going to have to force the ISPs to put in hardware and software to support the wiretap. This includes large corporates who buy their internet access wholesale. Now what about Voice facilities that are proprietary such as the IM tools and Skype. Your wiretap vendor has a running battle now to keep up with all the various possible protocols some of which are proprietary.

3) Which brings us to Skype. Skype is fully decentralised, P2P and proprietary. How and where exactly would a Skype conversation between two arbitrary endpoints be wiretapped? How would a government agency go about building wiretap facilities for Skype? As if that wasn't hard enough, this is made considerably harder because Skype traffic and setup is encrypted.

4) So the next question is how good is the Skype encryption? Has anyone done any peer analysis and review of Skype's encryption? It's a truism in encryption that security by obscurity doesn't work. The only way to ensure reasonably good encryption is to make the process and technology completely transparent and open. So for example, it's completely useless to use military grade encryption if the key generation or key transfer is done badly or easily guessed. But Skype are probably never going to allow their code to be peer-reviewed which means that we can never know if it's any good.

5) We're beginning to see encryption add ons for things like MSN Messenger and the other IM packages. All the same peer review issues apply. And all the same wiretap issues apply.

6) Almost all the IM systems now have voice capability. But just as their IM functions don't interoperate, their voice functions don't use common standards and they don't interoperate. Unusually, the most surprising was actually MSN Messenger. Up to V4.7 it had a SIP compliant mode that would work with any SIP VoIP system. After that they removed the UI but I think kept the underlying code and now only support specific commercial VoIP-POTS services. MS (and I think the other main IMs) are active in the SIP and SIMPLE standards bodies so why don't they offer it to the end user.

7) Why is SIP and NAT-Firewall configuration so hard for VoIP? The great thing about Skype is that it *just works*. Every other VoIP client I've tried has either been a PITA to configure, or simply didn't work, or depended on a central proxy/relay that is never going to scale.

8) And the big one. Really cheap rate international and national call gateways are starting to appear that piggy back on commodity VoIP systems like IM and Skype. This is going to progressively eat into the Telco's core revenue streams. It seems inevitable that this will become an issue sooner rather than later and Telco's will have to either downsize, shift to a wholesale model or just rely on cellphone charges and cellphone addons like ringtone sales. How long will it be before one or more Telcos get hit *hard* in their bottom line by loss of core business to internet based voice calls?

9) Before the year is out, we'll see combined GSM/CDMA cellphones with a built in WiFi card that can switch relatively seamlessly between cell and WLAN+VoIP access. In the last few years we laughed at journalists writing yet another WLAN vs 3G story. But this could finally kill 3G except for data access in the wild countryside. If I can wait 30 minutes to drive to the nearest Little Chef, Texaco or McDonalds, I can get all the data access and all the free voice calls I need. How long before WLAN hotspots become so widespread that a traveling salesman (and the rest of us) could make that sort of choice? [from: JB Ecademy]

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]