Was the Bush Inaurguration speech, just empty rhetoric?

Tim seems to think so.

Ken Kutaragi, President of Sony Computer Entertainment, admitted that Sony made strategic misjudgments when it let its Media division's DRM zealousness reduce innovation and product flexibility in its consumer electronics divisions. via Techdirt.

Note that we've yet to see Sony really learn this lesson. Maybe they didn't really fall far enough to be a perfect example, but it would be good if Sony could represent an example to all those other companies that Open trumps Proprietary.

I've wondered at times if there's a constant stream of MBAs that come into business focussed on the short term gains to be had from closed proprietary systems. The individuals in this stream each has to relearn the lesson that openness results in a much larger market and much bigger long term gains But unfortunately by the time they work this out another batch of short temr focussed MBAs has arrived.

Time for Sony to go back and re-read Cory's speech to Microsoft? And time for Sony to take the fight to Apple, since Creative (for all their noise) don't seem to be able to do it.

And time for all of us to "Just Say No to DRM"

remembering rebecca :: january 2005 : I've noticed another little problem with Technorati tags. When I updated my site on Monday, I created tags for all the posts, and pinged Technorati. On Tuesday, I pinged Technorati two more times when I updated here. It is now Wednesday evening, and I have yet to see any of my tags catalogued on their site.

Me too. Technorati is clearly collecting some tagging information, but at the same time it's clearly not working right yet. And the Tag pages keep changing layout. And there's some weirdness about the layout according to whether they have got any data for the tag or not. kind of odd that tags aren't integrated into the keyword system as well. Surely, a keyword search should be on the combined page as well. Then today furl tags started showing up as well as del.icio.us. I think what we're seeing is a work in progess where development is being done in public. Let's hope it all settles down soon.

In other news, I'm every bit as uncomfortable with the Rebecca Blood piece as Burningbird. We seem to be playing out the same old, same old pattern once more that's been done a million times before in online communities. The Politically Correct Police (PCP) are making lots of noise about how "This isn't right and SOMETHING SHOULD BE DONE". The Anti-PCP come along, who love a good flame war, and are finding ways to wind them up. The poor developers get backed into a corner and end up coming up with a series of nasty hacks to sanitise what was once a nicely elegant, simple and minimalist solution. What makes me laugh in all this are the ludicrous solutions put forward by the PCP who clearly have never been anywhere code.

# Technorati could design their system not to publish any photo Flickr users have tagged "Might be offensive".. So just like the major search engines, Technorati will need an advanced search option "filter adult content". That's seriously hard and will never work 100%. And BTW, I don't think the photo in question is actually tagged on Flickr as "may offend".

# Technorati could create their own tagging system, and not publish any photo Technorati users tagged "Might be offensive". It's not just photos. It'll have to apply to every one of the millions of entries in Technorati.

# Technorati could provide an email address so that users could alert staff if a photo was offensive or inappropriate, and then the staff could go in and tag the inappropriate photo so that it would not appear on Technorati's site--or hand-select an appropriate one. Ah, the Fintstones approach. Just throw manual effort at it until you've got 250 outsourced support staff in Mumbai. I don't think so.

The whole point of Technorati is that it's dynamic and timely. Which means a very high throughput of items. Which means automation of everything. And which means if you're offended by what you see, look away for 5 minutes. And a prize to the first hacker to get goatse to appear on the MLK page.

Which then brings me to the core element Rebecca weas complaining about.

Now, that photo is perfectly appropriate on Flickr as part of an individual's collection, and as documentation of Sunday's rally. It's perfectly appropriate as an illustration for 'protests', or even 'Israel' and 'Palestine', even though it surely will offend some people wherever it appears. But it is not appropriate to illustrate a category tagged 'MLK'. I personally was offended--these sentiments reflect the polar opposite to those espoused by Dr. King. More to the point, such an illustration is inappropriate--that poster has as much to do with Dr. King as would a picture of a banana peel.

How is this Technorati's problem? The photo was tagged on Flickr with MLK. Technorati is correctly pointing this out. Don't you want to see conflicting views? And who gives a damn if you're offended?

I called Technorati to register a protest. You wasted their support team's time with your petty complaint by telephone? Damn. That's exactly why I have the phone off the hook, and IM turned to DND. What's wrong with email?

Goddess preserve us from people who say "SOMETHING MUST BE DONE".

Journalist Mike Butcher ( profile: http://www.ecademy.com/account.php?id=18161 ) is writing an article for a European print magazine which has a wide circulation across Europe. The article is a fairly light-hearted one about what communications gadgets European business-people use - you know, 3G, blackberries, etc... that sort of thing.

He has have a set of questions to send to any European business execs - the more well-known they are the better - willing to take part and be featured in the magazine. Its an opportunity for someone to be exposed to a wide audience and in print, for a change. He'll also need a photo.

Please contact him on mike@mbites.com for more information.

ps. I don't post blogs for just any old Basic member. [from: JB Ecademy]

I'm building a Tagging system into VoidStar as a way of prototyping what I'll do on Ecademy. It's truning out nicely. Here's what I write about in terms of popular Tags.

Ecademy suffered terrible performance yesterday. It was largely caused by a single bad robot from become.com. So I've now put in long, long robots.txt file and today we're only using half the bandwidth. I've still got some more database tidy ups to do, specifically around avoiding a UNION query.

[from: del.icio.us]

10 days ago I threw up another Drupal site for the Feet Forward Motorcycle Community. It's been quite interesting watching some totally non-tech users getting to grips with it. They're coping pretty well.

I wanted to bolt the simple html editor into it an hit a small problem. As usual Drupal has got suitable hooks to bolt in, but it wanted to put the toolbar above the title of the field. I also had to hack common.inc a bit to get the required hooks into the <textarea> tag.

Following a post on Buzzmachine.

For a long time now, Ecademy.com has had a field on user records that we call "50 words". This is exactly personal tagging. And we export this in our FOAF. Given the sudden explosion of tagging in the blog world, I've been trying to grok how to make this more explicit and get those tags out of Ecademy and into the outside world to places like Technorati. But here we're talking about relatively static data about users rather than the dynamic data of blog entries and the various blog aggregators and search engines aren't very interested.

Something that would kick this up a gear would be MT, Blogger, Wordpress plugins that made it easy to build an "About Me" page. Over time this could morph into a personal identity server a la LID. It should provide lots of API hooks (like FOAF) in the same way that Blog entries provide RSS/Atom. If this happened, then a "50 words" tag field in the plug in would make good sense.

What do you call a collection of Apple Fanatics? A Zealot? Well I'm surely not the first but from now on I intend to call them "Pod People".

Why is it that any criticism of Apple or Apple products results in a whole lot of Pod People piling in and accusing the author of being Anti-Apple as though this was something evil?

Come on guys, Apple products suck just as badly as the whole of the rest of the IT industry, just in new and innovative ways. They're very pretty and all. And most of it is pretty good. But they're still over priced, under specced and have lots of weird new ways of sucking.

Well that didn't work, so let's try another one.

This is a test to see if this post ends up in Technorati. Here's a Technorati Tag.
ecademy.
.

What bothers me about this is whether it's ok to have invisible technorati tags. eg
<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/voidstar" rel="tag"></a> because I don't want to clutter the page with technorati tags, if I've also got an internal tagging UI. But until I actually get a post to show up in Technorati I can't tell. I could ask of course...

This is a test to see if this post ends up in Technorati. Here's a Technorati Tag.
voidstar

Here's one of those should exist problems.

Start a search for your favourite band. Specify .Mp3 only. Get the results as an RSS feed. Use your podcaster to collect the feed and treat every entry as an enclosure to be downloaded. Voila! One week later you're well on the way to building your own local archive of every instance on the web. Now instead of music and mp3, try .torrent of videos of your favourite TV show.

There's clearly a lot of problems with handling duplication and managing disk space. But right now, with MSN doing RSS output and Yahoo already doing it, the potential is there. The next problem is that I had a look at the advanced search settings in Google, MSN and Yahoo. In all of them, file format is a drop down list with only a few entries although you can use command line style parameters so a search for Alias (the TV show) torrents http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=alias+filetype%3Atorrent does appear to work.

What's interesting is that some of these searches produce almost no results. So http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=def+jam+filetype%3Amp3 has a single result from Japan. Which makes me wonder. Does Google really not index Mp3s or the ID tags inside Mp3s? Or is it really the case that there's only a single Def Jam .mp3 or audio/mpeg on the web?

Spy Blog: SMS disaster alert and warning systems - don't do it ! is a good summary of the issues with trying to implement my suggested SMS-Tree early warning system.

I do think though that some of the problems are overstated. The major one seems to be that an SMS tree is no different from email spam, and if you received an email spam warning of the Tsunami you wouldn't act on it. I think the biggest difference here is that one level down the tree you are receiving the SMS from a friend not from some arbitrary spammer. And the high level of manual intervention at every stage would work to verify the system and provide natural cut offs for "Crying Wolf".

"A self selected SMS flash mob "warning" system is no substitute for a proper Civil Defence and Emergency Services system, and tempting though it is to some people to create one, you should be kicking your government for proper resources for the latter and not be wasting time and lives on the former." I'm deeply distrustful of the ability of Governments and centralised bodies to build big systems n time and on budget. My proposal was really a straw man for bottom up and de-centralised systems as an alternative or parallel development. I happen to believe that bottom up systems can be built faster, cheaper and more effectively. But maybe this one was made of straw and has been comprehensively burnt. After all, he's pointing out all the problems that I knew would come up and had tried to deal with by at least having a central clearing house and having the first layer of the tree be trusted individuals.

RSS Feeds for Search Results

This appears to work in each of the Beta search sections simply by adding &format=rss on the end of the URL. So with MSN and Yahoo both doing this, Google is now the odd one out. Unless of course you host a copy of GNews2RSS.

What's interesting here is that it looks like it may be possible to do the same trick on the image search, although every time I try I get a "The MSN Search (beta) is currently unavailable." message that feels like it's covering up a software crash.

Of course the catch in all this is that Googles news output is still considerably better than Yahoo's or MSN's.

Bloggerheads (UK) - I am Jack's complete lack of surprise

Fascinating. The UK political Blog aggregator I threw together one weekend is distorting the Google view of UK Politicians. Several of the proxy blogs stalking MPs now appear in the top 10 links for the MP's name via their feed display in the aggregator.

With an election coming up, the Aggregator and each proxy blog need your help in terms of links in and content. Of course I'm assuming here that you think it's a good thing that each MP and prospective MP is more famous on the web for the Blog that fact checks their arse rather than their own boring and useless website.

Have you taken digital photos of an Ecademy Event?

Then please post them to Flickr with at least one of the tags being "Ecademy". [from: JB Ecademy]

[from: del.icio.us]

Details about Podcast audio manipulation using Audacity [from: del.icio.us]

Note to self.
http://www.musicplasma.com/
http://www.music-map.com

peer to peer broadcasting of sound and video compatible with shoutcast [from: del.icio.us]