The Blog
11 Mar 2005 Another great long tail article.
Bnoopy: The long tail of software. Millions of Markets of Dozens. : Whatever business your starting, think about how to serve millions of markets of dozens instead of dozens of markets of millions. So how does this relate to marketing and selling to SMEs? SMEs are a classic long tail market. 10 Mar 2005 USATODAY.com - Music fans reach for the stars
Unusually good USA Today article about the current music scene and the effects of viral internet marketing and the long tail. [from: del.icio.us] 09 Mar 2005 08 Mar 2005 I'm Backing Blair because
He's tough on Blame. Tough on the causes of Blame. I imagine a small meeting in the back of 10 Downing Street. Blur: I know it's not going to work, you know it's not going to work, but make it look plausible. If we get this right, we can finally get one over the law lords. Clarke (for it is he): yes, but... Blur: Look. I know Blunkett was a lunatic but we can't back out now. Just do it, ok? later that same day Blur: Getting the MPs to vote on an amendment they hadn't seen and you hadn't written was a master stroke. Well done. 14 votes was a bit close, but we got away with it. Now if the lords throw it out we can do the same thing we did with the Fox hunting bill. A few more of these and we'll be rid of the Lords for ever. 07 Mar 2005 Big Music loses to AllofMP3.com Moscow prosecutor throws out IFPI case that tried to close down AllOfMp3.
Hooray! 06 Mar 2005 I've just been watching River Cottage with Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall and there was a fantastic backing track from Kruder and Dorfmeister, "Black Babies". Now it's Crufts and they've got some chillout electronica that I don't recognise. For the last couple of years BBC2 have been using chillout tracks from the likes of Bonobo, Blockhead, Cinematic Orchestra and a whole bunch of Bristol based trip hop. I think what's happening is that a lot of the programs are made in BBC Bristol and the guys and gals doing the sound are all chillout and lounge jazz freaks who hang out with the Bristol music scene.
The BBC are really good at providing lots of detail about the programs. They could do me (and probably others) a real service by providing the track listing as well. The same goes for the Extreme Sports channel. They have some fantastic skateboard videos late at night with some ace chilled rap. But unless you Tivo or tape the program there's no chance of catching the credits and working out what was being played. The Doc Searls Weblog : Sunday, March 6, 2005
There's something wonderful about this. Get a Linux guy to review a windows product that only works with IE6. His first reaction after rebooting in Windows? Launch Firefox. Of course! Anyway one bit in the article that caught my eye. "what Craig Burton calls EBWU: evil, bad, wrong and ugly". Yup, I'll go with the Bad, Wrong and Ugly. I'll just pass on the evil as I don't like that word and don't think it should be applied to technology. The more I think about this, the more I think we should be going after Google because the toolbar is crap and runs in a crap environment. Let's tell them to go away and build a better one that runs in Firefox and in open source so we can hack it to bits and turn it into a tool for 05 Mar 2005 I was just checking out the UK Political blogs site that I run and noticed a Google Ad at the top.
Conservative Politics. Huge selection of new and used. Check out the deals now. Which links to eBay. Is the Tory party selling off old policies? I think we should be told. 04 Mar 2005 It's 2005 and web fonts still don't work.
I happen to like reading 10pt Arial (sorry if you don't). But people tell me I should be using em sizes and % rather than absolute pts for "Accessibility", whatever that is. So what em size should I use so that the text appears as 10pt in most browsers using the default font sizes? As far as I can see it's 0.8em in IE6 and 1.0em in Firefox. If I use 1.0em in IE6 it looks horribly large (about 12pt) in text size medium and 10pt in Text size small. So to hell with accessibility. I'm using absolute font sizes that look the same in IE6 and Firefox and if you can't read it then use Firefox and bump up the text size. These days "accessibility" does not mean "must code for IE6 functionality" since there is an alternative. I've just spent an hour wrestling with CSS to try and achieve the holy grail of a Slashdot style layout in pure CSS again. The current trick is to have header, float left column, float right column, centre column, footer with clear both. This works and you're looking at it right now. But it would be good if the document sequence was actually header, centre, left column, right column, footer as the margins often contain links to external websites that can take some time to fill. The effect is that the margins appear before the centre.
So I had this cunning plan to wrap the middle vertically between the header and footer in a dummy div with relative positioning, and then to set the left and right column to absolute positioning. So I'd have header, middle, centre column, left column, right column, middle end, footer. By setting the middle to overflow:auto, it should contain the longest of left, centre and right columns and the footer should then float below this. It works beautifully in Firefox. Needless to say it doesn't work in IE6 as overflow:auto in IE6 only works on absolute position blocks and starts throwing scrollbars. If a left or right column is longer than the center column, it overlaps the footer. Arrghh! Why is CSS so hard? It's enough to make you go back to tables. I suppose there's always a chance that IE7 will fix all this, but I'm not putting any money on the table. SAJAX - Simple Ajax Toolkit by ModernMethod - XMLHTTPRequest Toolkit for PHP
Now let's see if I can hack this into a Google Suggest style tag form element [from: del.icio.us] 03 Mar 2005 Has anyone tried to deconstruct a gmail email to find the IP address or other indication of the originator? Yahoo seems to be fairly good about this as they include the originator's IP in the message ID. But I can't see anything in the gmail headers to help.
If you know how to do this, please get in touch. julian_bond at voidstar.com 01 Mar 2005 You know what? This "Google Toolbar is Evil" thing looks to me like nothing more than a flame war between the Alpha Geeks and the Alpha Commentators. The Alpha geeks who make their money from code are all going "Hey, cool hack. Let's write a Firefox extension that does that and this as well". The Alpha Commentators who make money from their words, are all going "my words are sacrosanct, how dare you change them".
So I had an idea. I went looking for a Google critic who has a Creative Commons license on their blog. I finally found one. Micro Persuasion and here. Look there's an "Attribution 1.0" license on the blog. You are free: So this guy has given permission for Google to make a commercial, derivative work of his blog as long as it retains an attribution. Well the Google Auto-link function does exactly that. So what are you complaining about? Hmmm. So should Google respect the copyright license on web pages? Tricky. But a firefox extension writer could as there are already some extensions to display and act on the Creative Commons license where people have put the code in. Yesterday I had another person comment to me that tags looked too like Meta keywords in html pages, and that we'd pretty much discarded those because they got spammed to death. So far with flickr and del.icio.us there's very little incentive to tag spam and so we haven't seen much of it. But the moment that money is involved you can bet that somebody will think it's clever to swamp a tag system with every keyword they can think of.
Imagine for a moment that Craigslist discards it's broken sucky category system and switches to a folksonomy. If I have an iPod to sell in London, it would make sense to me to add tags to my enry so that it appeared in every tag search a potential buyer might use. This will quickly degenerate in an escalating war of tag placement and destroy the folksonomy. So the list developer will have to put some feedback loops and limits in. What we need is some positive social feedback loops that denegrate bad tagging and reward good tagging. Ideas? 27 Feb 2005 Hey, Google, Alexa Where are my Firefox toolbars? Yahoo can do it, why not you? Why should the 25 million odd Firefox users be shut out from spyware, proprietary protocols and the ability to mess with the page and add links to your commercial properties?
Oh, well, I guess we'll have to do it ourselves. As for the storm in a teacup currently running about the evil Google Toolbar, get over it folks. This seems to me to be a classic argument between the geeks and the non-geek writers. Publish on the web and - You have no privacy - People will screw with your content If you don't like it, then don't post on the web, publish on paper, or use some nasty locked down protocol like Adobe Acrobat with everything disabled so I can't even cut and paste. Because if you post in HTML, or XML, somebody somewhere is going to hack some nice little utility that converts all your proper nouns to WikiPedia links, all your ISBNs to Amazon links, removes your ads, kills your popups, turns all your text to yellow on red and changes the layout, copies and plagiarises your words, corrects your spelling, links all your Zips to a map site, turns your phone numbers into Skype links. And generally screws you over. And no amount of bleating about the first amendment and the sanctity of the publisher words or publisher opt out or opt in is going to prevent it. The moment you publish, All Your Text Are Belong To Us! In SOCIAL WEB' HAS FAR TO GO, BUT MUCH PROMISE Andy Oram says "It would be laughable to ask companies to add fields for cameras to a telephone XML schema, or fields for a telephone to a camera XML schema." and suddenly I'm in folksonomy land again.
So what happens when you mix XML schemas with Folksonomies? Folksonoschemas? You might think that I've just rediscovered RDF, but that's not it at all. In the above example, the companies could have just created their own taxonomies with their own RDF namespaces and we'd be no nearer combining them and doing searches for phones with cameras. Mainly because there's no obvious mapping between what are two independent taxonomy trees without detail knowledge of both. Yes we'd have a big pile of triples that could be searched and we could try and derive meaning from it. But to get to real meaning we need detailed knowledge of both namespaces and to build a map between them before we can start searching the triple space effectively. So could folksonomy tags help here? I rather think they could, but haven't worked out the detail. 24 Feb 2005 Music File Share Top Ten Big Champagne does P2P download tracking for the industry and is used by the music biz. They've just published their top 10 tracks for last week. The top 10 adds up to 50 million downloads. The total market muist be at least 10 times this. Making 500 million. So the P2P download market is doing twice as much per week as iTMS has done in it's 2 years. And my guessed figures could easily be a factor of 10 too low. So iTMS has less than 0.1% market share and maybe less than 0.01%
23 Feb 2005 Well I've got enough sponsorship and some funding from Ecademy and I'm going to ETCon. Hooray!
Of course, more money is always welcome!  Booking everything was the usual nightmare. Took ages trying to find reasonably priced flights and a hotel with Wifi, not too far from the hotel at reasonable price. I'm flying on Mon 14th Mar and returning on Sat 19th Mar This gives me a day hanging out in San Diego at the end. The flights doubled in price if I left on the Friday. I'm staying at the La Quinta Inn in Downtown San Diego which claims to have complimentary high speed internet access via wifi in all rooms. I'll be blogging here and on Ecademy about what I find. Gosh. Almost excited about all this. In 2001 I was unemployed and almost worked out how to go to ETCon for nothing. I had a flight on air miles, free pass and found a dirt cheap hostel. Then 9/11 happened about 2 weeks before the conference, there was an alleged anthrax scare and I bottled out. Last time I was in San Diego was for a Borland Developers conference followed by a driving trip up the left coast. That must have been '96 or '97. 
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