A good list of the Best Firefox Extensions Haven't tried Firefox yet? Well do yourself a favour and try it now. [from: JB Ecademy]

GigaDial.net is a new approach to radio programming. You can use it to create and subscribe to podcast-powered stations composed of individual episodes from your favorite podcasters. [from: del.icio.us]

iPodder.org : Adam is a high profile blogger actively involved in PodCasting. He's recently moved to the UK and is on the Epsom road near Guildford. Broadband is absolutely essential to what he does.

He's being given the run around by BT who claim that the equipement in his local exchange is full and the best he can do is wait for one of the current customers to cancel and free up a port. This sounds pretty strange.

Right now he's broadcasting his daily radio show, via PodCast from the Starbucks in Guildford centre, 2pm every day.

So can anyone in Ecademy help Adam get broadband? [from: JB Ecademy]

Lots of interesting integration between MSN Spaces and the new Messenger V7.

Now why doesn't Messenger respect the default internet browser? Sometimes it launches it for some activities but for others it always uses IE6. [from: JB Ecademy]

0wn3d in 200 seconds | The Register : An unprotected Windows XP machine was breached within four minutes, and became a zombie in less than ten hours, tests conducted by USA Today show. The paper set up six honeypot PCs and monitored the results.

An XP PC running SP1 was breached by an intruder through a hole that the Sasser worm used, only four minutes into the test. Within fifteen minutes two intrusions took place, one using the MS Blaster hole. Within ten hours hackers had established an irc channel and the machine was broadcasting its vulnerabilities to the world at large. A Windows Small Business Server was similarly compromised, with the intruder uploading a program which gave full control of the machine.

Never, never, plug a brand new PC onto the internet without a firewall between it and the net. If you've already got a network and router in place this is all fairly easy. What worries me though is the average home user this christmas who finally splashes out on Broadband and a PC. Most of them will just plug it in, find it works and go and get a cup of tea. The machine may well start automatically downloading and installing SP2, but the machine will be attacked and 0wn3d well before they ever get to installing it.

This problem is solvable. Just not this year and not the way PCs currently start up from being taken out of the box for the first time.

I was checking my incoming logs a week ago, and I'm getting attacked 2 or 3 times a minute. I wondered why the cable modem light was on pretty much continuously these days. This is not going to get better any time soon. [from: JB Ecademy]

http://p2pnet.net/story/3180

I love it!

Comes pre-loaded with classic Negativland
# Points (1981)
# Free (1993)
# Fair Use (1995)
# Dispepsi (1997)
# Happy Heroes (1998)
# The ABCs of Anarchism (1999, with Chumbawamba)
# Deathsentences of the Polished and Structurally Weak (2002)

Somebody just sent me a message saying they'd screwed up a club home page and could I retrieve a backup. So I did a Google search for that page, and Google had a copy of the old page in the Google cache. It's comparatively easy to then cut and paste it back in.

Occasionally somebody manages the same thing on their profile. This is a good line of first defence.

Lovely, Google is your friend! [from: JB Ecademy]

Have you got a Microsoft Passport? If you use hotmail or MSN Messenger, you have. Well now you can have your own Blog run by Microsoft.

Here's my test one. It took all of 5 minutes to build. VoidStar

The whole service is cut down and you definitely won't have the flexibility of running Movable type or wordpress or even Blogger but it's not bad and quite full featured.

[from: JB Ecademy]

for small websites and people in the content generation business [from: del.icio.us]

Times Online - Newspaper Edition : ECADEMY www.ecademy.com

A multi-faceted online business exchange which boasts free membership as its biggest carrot, Ecademy runs various networking forums divided according to location and theme (there are networks for women, recruitment and the intriguingly-titled Beyond Bricks). Working as a cross between an online forum and a weblog, the format takes a while to get used to but is simple to use once you do.

Also mentioned
BRITISH CHAMBERS OF COMMERCE
MANAGEMENT AND LEADERSHIP COUNCIL
ACTIVE PLACES
PEER RESOURCES: MENTORING
HR ZONE
[from: JB Ecademy]

Times Online - Newspaper Edition

THE Apple iTunes music store has refused to sell the charity Band Aid song Do They Know It’s Christmas? because it would damage the company’s dominance of the download market.

The track costs £1.49 on other major online sites which have agreed to donate their profits to relief efforts in Africa. Apple sells individual tracks at 79p but has refused to raise its price for the charity song.

Because of iTunes’s dominance of the online market, Apple’s refusal to sell the track could reduce the revenues raised through online sales by 70 per cent. Millions of iPod owners will not be able to play the track over the Christmas period.

Unbelieveable! They're quite happy to break EU law by having differential charging between EU countries. They're quite happy to overcharge for a pretty poor product. And now this.

Come on Apple. Do the right thing. [from: JB Ecademy]

Blog Torrent is software that makes it much easier to share and download files using the bittorrent protocol. Blog Torrent is easy to install on your website: we don't use MySQL so installation is as easy as uploading a folder to your web host, and all ad [from: del.icio.us]

Froogle wishlist Why be tied to one retailer’s wish list?

I'm not sure yet whether it works in the UK with the new UK Froogle system. [from: JB Ecademy]

Combining his training in classical and jazz with a passion for North American and British popular music Victor creates a mood reminiscent of modern producers such as DJ Food and DJ Krush. [from: del.icio.us]

Flickr screensaver done.
http://www.wackylabs.net/articles/flickr_screensaver_v2.php

Now we need the desktop wallpaper changer.

Ain't the lazyweb wonderful?

MICROSOFT'S MIGHTY Internet Explorer is fast losing its market share, according to figures by Dutch based traffic outfit OneStat.com.

Apparently only 88.9 percent of known world use the browser indicating that its time is up and Vole should surrender entirely.

I think it's quite significant that it's share has now fallen below 90%. I could sit here and say "Time to try Firefox" like I usually do. But the real story here is that IE hasn't really introduced any new features since IE5 which is now a long time ago. Saying "Wait till Longhorn" just doesn't cut it. Has Microsoft forgotten the adage, "Ship Early, Ship often". [from: JB Ecademy]

1) Lack of APIs. The only one they have is the original SOAP interface to Google Search. What about all the other services?

2) Lack of XML output. Why can't I get RSS/Atom from Google searches, especially Google News

3) Lack of support for XML documents. Google doesn't yet do anything useful with XML documents it finds beyond displaying them as text.

4) Indexing not fast enough. Technorati indexes blog entries in minutes. Google still takes days.

5) AdWords volume support. There appears to be no easy way to generate large numbers of AdWords Ads. It's biased towards manual input of small numbers. This is limiting for new business models based on it.

6) AdSense pays in US Dollars on a US Cheque. This is a PITA for non-US customers. Come on guys, you've got regional offices. Where's the regional pament?

7) AdSense is still too generic. Even though it generally works quite well, it still has a tendency to default to a generic Ad. Why are 90% of the Ads on this site for Blogging tools when that's >10% of my writing?

Note that most of the above applies to MSN Search (even the new one) and Yahoo! Search as well.

distributed, p2p, transparent, nat friendly web cacheing [from: del.icio.us]

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.

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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?