Here's yet another business plan. I feel ok about giving it out as right now it can't be completed.

1. Create a Craigslist style listing service using Flickr/del.icio.us style tagging instead of Craigslist style categories
2. Make it free but for money provide an automated method whereby it generates Google Ads for each entry. Use the tags to create the keywords for use by Google.
3. Taking a cut of the process so the cost is Google AdWords costs plus 30% or so
4. ????
5. Profit!

There's just one catch (apart from the effort of creating the system). Google don't have an API for automatically creating Ads. And having looked at their Ad Management system I don't think they expect you to manage or create very large numbers of ads.

Clearly they should.

So I did a little work on using the GET interface to AdSense to get back the Google ad for a specific page. I then wrote some regex to extract the key URLs and text to turn it into something like this.

---

Start blogging today [Ad by Google]
Share photos and more. Easy to use Sign up for your free trial today

---

This is plain old html and could be fairly easily inserted into an RSS feed. It's got all the right URLs so that a click through should credit my Google account. I'd run a cron job to get the Google Ad for each blog entry and then merge it into the RSS when that was requested. Probably by adding it as the last line of selected blog entries.

But as I tested it, I noticed that only a few of my blogs actually generated a targeted ad. The vast majority never find any interesting key words and I get what looks like a default Ad for the site as a whole . This is a blog so you must want an ad for blogging systems. Well no actually. But does this mean that I write too much stuff that is just not a target Ad writers want to hit? Or have I hit a fundamental limitation in AdSense that it's actually just not very good or doesn't have a wide enough inventory of Ads?

Anyway back to the experiment. It looks to me like I would have to just strip all the generic Blog Ads out as they are going to be pretty annoying in an RSS feed. I'm a bit disapoointed by this. And given that Google don't want me to try this anyway, I'm not sure I can be bothered to take the next step in the experiment and actually start adding the Ads into the feed.

So is Overture any better? Although I'm sure I've seen Overture Ads, I don't think I've ever been led to the Overture signup page. Should I go and seek it out? Would it earn me more money? Are they more RSS friendly?

[from: del.icio.us]

[from: del.icio.us]

I've been playing with Podcasting and hacking my home brew (PHP) RSS aggregator to support it. After 3 weeks or so, this is what I think I've learned. (If you don't know what podcasting is go here)

- Most podcasts right now are like amateur talk radio. Well my life involves words. If I'm not programming or reading web pages, I'm reading a book or a newspaper. So I have very little time in a typical day when I'm doing an activity where I can allow another source of words to distract me. It's just not possible to read text and listen to people talking at the same time. So I just don't listen to talk radio. Which means that podcasting as it is currently has very little appeal to me. However, using the enclosure tag in RSS feeds has a lot of possibilities for distributing sound, video and graphic images. It may not be central to podcasting as it's currently being implemented but the technology is the same. A good example of this would be the Chillosophy group distributing chill out mixes they had developed. Or a B3ta group distributing Flash mashes they'd done.

- My first experiment was just to build a handler for enclosures that grabbed anything that appeared in a feed and copied to the local disk. Now my aggregator frequently took hours to run instead of seconds. So the next trick was to kick off a background job to do the collection. This is trivial in Linux but a pain in the neck under XP. It involved using AT and SOON to create batch jobs running bat files in background a minute later. Yuk!

- After running this for a couple of weeks I had 2Gb of MP3 files none of which I listened to. So clearly it's really important for the aggregator to manage this and expire the enclosures. I also added a switch for each feed to decide whether the enclosure should be fetched or just to add a link to it in the display. One of the fun bits of glue and string I've put together is to grab the enclosures from a Flickr feed of Everyone's pictures on a 3 day expiry. So I've got a directory containing a rolling 250 or so JPGs of random stuff people have posted to Flickr. I've then pointed the "My Pictures Slideshow" screen saver at this directory so I have a screensaver that shows random photos.

- Several podcasters are being hit by significant bandwidth needs from all the enclosure collection going on. As I've written before there's a natural synergy between aggregators running in background, podcasting and BitTorrent. This brings up some issues.

- Firstly take one look at Azureus and you'll realize that writing a BT client is non-trivial. It makes far more sense to offload collection of a Torrent to a dedicated BT client than to write a bad client built into the aggregator. Unfortunately Azureus is not completely transparent at this and tends to popup a UI window when the request is made. It doesn't necessarily save the result where you'd expect. And because of the indirection, it's that much more difficult to get the aggregator to expire the resulting files.

- BitTorrent is still a little awkward to use for the publisher. It takes just a bit too much effort to create the torrent, post it's existence on a tracker and then do the initial seeding. So at the moment relatively few podcasts use BT. This is a shame given that it's such a good technology. We need to get to the point where publishing an MP3 via BT is a one click operation.

- BT suffers like a lot of P2P tech that it doesn't always just work when the client is behind a NAT firewall. So again there is an issue working against everyone using it.

- At this point, we probably need feeds to provide the same enclosure in plain JPG, MP3 or whatever and also in BT with the BT one taking precedence if the particular client can handle it. But RSS2 doesn't have a good mechanism for saying "Use this BT enclosure if you can or that MP3 if not, or stream it in high quality here and low quality there. They're all the same". Meanwhile Atom and RSS 1 are still arguing on how to code enclosures at all, at all. Given the current state of RSS and Atom standards control I'm not sure how we get through this one.

- Going back up to my approach of adding a link to the enclosure into the aggregator. At this point why not simply stream the file rather than downloading it? Well Podcasting originally involved syncing the file onto an iPod so that it could be listened to at times and places where streaming was impossible. This is still valid but downloading where streaming is possible appears to smack of scarcity thinking. Except that streaming puts a nasty load on publishers that get popular. Scaling streaming is hard and expensive. At this point I remember Swarmcast and all the work being done in that area at the height of the P2P boom. Where are you now? It's also worth delving into what Skype are doing with automated supernodes.

- I've been looking at turning group Skype Conference calls into podcasts as a way of doing low tech, low effort podcasts from a group of experts. I think I've found a way of doing it, but it's actually quite hard without being professionally involved in sound production. You can just about do it with audio grabbing software and the plain old Windows mixer, but it's tricky to get it all right. If anyone has some tips I'd like to hear them.

- Anyone can write text. Most people can take a half decent photograph. Few people can produce quality audio. Almost no-one can produce quality video. It's great that podcasting is democratising distribution of high bandwidth media, but it's a few factors of magnitude harder than blogging to actually create the content.

So at the end of all that, Podcasting looks like being a driver for all sorts of technologies and there's still plenty of work to do. And while we're looking at this distribution method, it's worthwhile looking at other P2P distribution of dense media such as Mercora or 3Degrees. I think they're all related. [from: JB Ecademy]

How To Steal Wi-Fi - And how to keep the neighbors from stealing yours. By Paul Boutin : When I moved into a new neighborhood last week, I expected the usual hassles. Then I found out I'd have to wait more than a month for a DSL line. I started convulsing. If I don't have Net access for even one day, I can't do my job. So, what was I supposed to do? There's an Internet café on the next block, but they close early. I had no choice, it was time to start sneaking on to my neighbors' home networks.

Every techie I know says that you shouldn't use other people's networks without permission. Every techie I know does it anyway. If you're going to steal, no, let's say borrow your neighbor's Wi-Fi access, you might as well do it right.

So that's alright then. Actually quite an interesting article that points out that there are a very large number of wireless access points out there that are part of the "Factory Default Community Network".. You can spot them because they have names like "linksys," "default," "Wireless," "NETGEAR," "belkin54g," and "Apple Network 0273df."

What I don't understand though is all his talk about passwords. Surely he's not hacking into the admin interface on these APs? Generally if an AP is still on Factory Defaults it will give you access and DHCP at which point you're good to go. There's no password involved in this at all, at all.

One of the comments talks about asking the owner first. But frankly how do you do this? It's not generally easy at all to physically locate the AP if all you have is a signal on your laptop. Which is why I'd strongly encourage people to change their SSID to include some location info such as "1 Trinity Rd-public". Then if you want people to ask first they have at least got a chance of knowing where to go. [from: JB Ecademy]

Anyone here with experience of writing Win XP screensavers or code to manipulate the desktop? There's no money in it, but here's a fun little project that could earn you some peer recognition brownie points.

Take the Flickr API. Use it to get photos from Everyone's photos or a short list of tags. Use the photos to generate a random image screensaver, and/or update the desktop image every n minutes.

I've got a proof of concept where I'm taking their RSS feed and downloading the enclosures into a directory. I then use the Win XP My Pictures Slideshow screen saver to display them. but it's all a bit heath robinson. [from: JB Ecademy]

This article; Marc's Voice: Outliners structure editors prompted me to write something I've been considering for a while.

Outliners and Outlining are a very useful technique for getting one's thoughts in order and organising a document or argument in nice, understandable and straight line form. It's a pattern that we've ended up using in many places from XML to DMOZ to directories like Yahoo to bulleted lists.

So why are they harmful? Well when you use a tool that encourages you to think in terms of hierarchies, everything looks like a hierarchy. Unfortunately the world is much much messier than that. Almost everything is actually a mesh not a hierarchy. And when hierachies do exist in the data, it's very likely that you will find 2 or more inherent hierarchies that are orthogonal and in most real world situations it's more like 10. Which leads you to all sorts of mess with regional divisions versus category divisions and the same item being placed in lots of different places in the parallel hierarchies you're forced into using.

To see this in action, you've only got to look at how generally useless DMOZ is for actually finding anything. Or look at Craigslist with it's repeating categories in lots of very artificial regional sites.

I also think this is at the core of the lack of understanding between the XML and RDF camps. The XML people think everything is a hierarchy and when they look at simple RDF that's all they see. The RDF people understand that everything is a mesh and that a hierarchy is a just a special case of a mesh. But because everything is a mesh, there is only arcs, nodes and triples.

I suspect that the move towards anarchic tagging in systems like del.cio.us and Flickr are driven by this tension between mesh and hierarchy as well though I haven't seen it expressed like this. Tag driven systems look horribly uncontrolled to hierarchy people. But they actually reflect the real world much better than hierarchies.

It's very common in the hierarchy world to have big aguments about the structure and content of the category hierarchy which then leads to demands for some centralized control over who can edit the tree or even who can define how a new tree is built. So there's a certain irony here that category hierarchies require a political hierarchy to control them. Mesh based systems avoid this by frequently de-centralizing control over the categories in the mesh right out to the end user.

So in a nutshell, Outliners are harmful because they lead to hierarchy thinking. And hierarchy thinking is harmful because it leads to political hierarchies. And all of this is harmful because the world is actually mess(h)y and not structured into elegant trees.

Recently posted this on Doc's IT Garage.

There are many blogs out there that use AdSense to make a little beer money and it generally works very well. The Google system has an uncanny knack of posting mostly relevant ads for the blog or blog post. It's also fairly unobtrusive.

Since I think Ads in RSS is inevitable, we should be arguing about finding an approach that mirrors this rather than whether they should be there at all. The Ads should be unobtrusive, and well targeted. I don't think that creating dummy items answers this. Neither do I think that leaving it to the aggregator works. ISTM that the best approach is a simple, short text ad added to the end of the description.

I've asked Google if they have or are thinking of extending AdSense to provide a service like this to content publishers and I got the expected non-reply that didn't say anything beyond "please don't put AdSense into RSS". There are some technical issues as well. Bear in mind that AdSense currently relies heavily on javascript and CSS which is likely to be stripped by any well behaved Aggregator. There's also a timing issue. Google is bad at targeting the ad correctly before it has spidered the specific page. And yet we're usually creating the RSS immediately after creating the post.

I'm going to try and create a proof of concept to see how well this works by using the GET call to AdSense and then stripping out the important bits from the Ad (title, link and text) before inserting it into RSS.

jbond posted a photo:

Another view of the pullback brackets

[from: Flikr Photos]

jbond posted a photo:

You can see that the handlebar cover still works but leaves a gap. The tiewraps keep the cables from rubbing on the fairing hole. The cables are *just* long enough to not need any lengthening.

[from: Flikr Photos]

jbond posted a photo:

Again, you can see that the cover does still fit but a bit more of the mounting hardware is exposed.

[from: Flikr Photos]

jbond posted a photo:

First remove the two covers that let you get at the rear tail bulbs.

[from: Flikr Photos]

jbond posted a photo:

£35 from Busters. They're German grips with a 3 position temperature control. The Suzuki throttle barrel has moulded in bits that need removing with a scalpel. I cut out all but the last circular bit at the controls end and left the longitudinal ridges. The grips have a moulded end so you have to lose the handlebar end weights. Getting the throttle side on was fairly easy. The other grip was a pain and too liberal quantities of WD40 to get it down over the handlebar end.

[from: Flikr Photos]

jbond posted a photo:

The temperature controller is quite large and there's no obvious place to put it with the handlebar cover. So I tie wrapped it into the left dash box. "Start" is the full max temperature and gets pretty hot. High is ok once everything is warmed up. Low hardly warms the grips at all.

[from: Flikr Photos]

jbond posted a photo:

With some estate agent sign and duct tape I've made some extensions to the bottom of the screen to keep the wind a bit more off my hands in the winter.

[from: Flikr Photos]

What is it? [from: del.icio.us]

Must read story [from: del.icio.us]

This is something I've wanted for decades now. Wireless stereo headphones that have a boom microphone attached. In these days of Bluetooth, VoIP, Skype, Mp3s, Winamp and so on I'm amazed I still can't find it.

I listen to a lot of music via the PC. I also use Skype. I've got Skype set so it auto-pauses the music on an incoming or outgoing call. What I want to do is to be able to get up and walk around rather than be tied to a cable. And to be able to get up and make a cup of tea without having to unplug myself.

If this was Bluetooth, it would be cool if the same approach could be used to link the headset, phone and portable music player (iPod).

As the headphones would need local power perhaps they could be noise cancelling as well. [from: JB Ecademy]

UK Copyright lawyer wanted to definitively answer two questions that are bugging me.

Regardless of the copyright notice inserted by the copyright holder, is it
1) legal to make a copy of the content for personal use?
2) legal to you to take a copy from somebody else for personal use.

The first is about doing things like ripping a CD to MP3 so you can play it on your iPod. My understanding is that ever since the first cassette tape recorders it became legal to do this. Somewhere prior to that you had to get a "license" of some sort to do it, but the law changed to allow it. It's also related to things like video recording commercial TV programs. It's important to point out that this is for personal use not for sharing with others.

The second is a little more awkward because I'm only talking about the person receiving the copy, not the person giving it. And this is specifically about downloading music from an untrusted source that may or may not have a license to distribute it.

I'm not interested in talking about the morals of all this. I'm trying to get sopme sort of definitive answer about whether it's legal and whether you're breaking the law by ignoring the copyright notice that may forbid it and hence whether the copyright notice is enforceable in these specific circumstances.

If you can throw any light on the same issues in other jurisdictions so much the better. [from: JB Ecademy]