The search for pr0n drives people to become alpha geeks

Everybody wants pr0n + laws and norms + everybody loves tech. =innovative ways to look without being seen.

The first vibrator was steam powered.
Early vibrators, were camouflaged technology "I only use it for therapeutic purposes."

1920 vibrators appear in pr0n and get banned by various states.

Late 1970s VCR introduces "private pr0n"

Obscenity law. What is Obscenity?
The Miller test.
- appeals to prurient interest
- offensive sex and/or excretions based on contemporary community standards
- has no social, literary, artistic or scientific value

child pr0n post 82, always obscene unless it's a fictional representation

seven dirty words. broadcasts subject to different values.

Private VCR tapes very different from movie theatres. much less likely to have community complaints. Hence VCR widens and encourages market.

Meanwhile on the internet.
Ascii pr0n was poor.
But cheap, easy and private means internet + pr0n is inevitable.
And Internet breaks 2nd prong of miller law. Where is the community? Important case that established that Internet was not subject to broadcast restrictions.

2005 US vs Extreme Associates
obscenity statutes are unconstitutional. Tight interpretation of privacy in own home.

Nitke vs Gonzales ongoing.
How can you define obscenity in community when community is the world.

pre-paid internet pr0n cards let you pay cash for porn.
user friendly anonymous proxies.
eg TOR. tor.eff.org downside is anonymous attacks on legitimate sites

Off the record messaging. repudiability and forward anonymity Each chat session has unique key exchange and key is discarded after session. "What's good for pr0n is good for free speech"

"Anonymity loves company. today's pr0n tools are tomorrow's human rights protections."

Other Tech areas being driven by pr0n industry. Bandwidth issues. peercasting, video on demand, teledildonics.

I wasn't there but caught a couple of comments on IRC.
(according to salesforce guy) "Sforce web service API is now responsible for 20% of salesforce.com activity."
Hm. And flickr this morning was cited at 15% right now, yes?

People seemed unimpressed by they're development environment. "Re-inventing Oracle forms".

Hilarious session with Matt Jones and Chris Heathcote. I can't remember any of it, because I was giggling on IRC the whole time. Mostly about moving computing down to unusual devices like door knobs and furniture. But the performance was like Adam and Joe. Gotta love the Brits.

The room was packed with people spilling out the door. O'Reilly have some size and planning problems.

Richard Rachid. MS Research.
- Harnessing human scale storage. Terabytes now cheap.
- Sensecam. A Black Box for a human being. Lots of sensors. Image stabilization a big problem. Key issue was working out, did something interesting happen. Is the camera stable. Privacy studies to see how people feel both about taking the data and appearing in it. Now working on V2.
- Unconventional devices. Live tables that react to things placed on them.
- Holographic films to create 3D displays linked to the 3D world. To create a 3D user interface.
- Fighting HIV with computer science. HIV. "The borg would be proud". Relates machine learning, spam and HIV. Shorter genomes are better. So using computer search to find shortest genome that expresses as one aspect of HIV.

Yahoo! Research. Gary Flake.
- Working with O'Reilly.
- Y!Q bookmarklet to popup a window that is context sensitive to what you were looking at.
- Improving aggregation by combining MyYahoo RSS aggregator with search. (sounds like technorati)
- Tech:Buzz game. Markets as predictors. Weights opinions from people who predict well. Built in partnership with NewsFutures. Like a futures market but tracks ideas and lets people compete on them. Fundamentally new type of auction. Has an API.

Google. Peter Norvig
- Key area of research is indexing new types of data. Then anaylsing it, then presenting it.
- Now showing Google Suggest. I don't think there's going to be anything new shown here. What Google are doing with these is to come up with new ways of interacting with a web page.
- Google personalization. Tags?

Jeff Bezos. Showing A9. He's using Win XP and the demo has just blown up!

Vertical search. Provides drill down into Google search data. Aim is to get the user community to create vertical search domains. Adding 3 tags to RSS to allow search to be syndicated which A9 then aggregates.

New A9 launched this morning. "See more columns"

Hard to describe but it allows people with domain expertise to develop tight search criteria that refelct their domain. And then to feed that back into the central site so other people can use it. Almost trivially easy to extend.

Break time. Now I have to try and find a power outlet or my laptop will die.

Ex Thinking Machines. Started the Long Now project to build a 10,000 year clock. Has worked wth Disney Imagineering. Now Applied Minds. Remixing Art, Technology. Aims to build V1.0 of things and avoid ever doing v2.0 So working with partners.
Los Angeles warehouse. But full of hardware, CNC machines, electron microscopes and stuff. 40 projects currently.

Now showing a Robot dinosaur.

- Robots. Best bit of robots is building the small models. Some very cool videos of 5 legged crabs, 4 legged rollers and a snake that hops. On the IRC channel someone says "okay, I'm holding my breath now, hoping that those cute robots aren't being bought up by the Pentagon and turned into killers.". The IRC channel is irc://irc.freenode.net/etech

Unbelievably hacked SUV. Packed full of electronic gear.

Also showing a software project on analysing anti-cancer drugs.

IMHO. Applied minds is what The Media Lab was and should have become.

Now showing a map interface combining a touch sensitive display built into a table. touch-sensitive full-table display of map. can drag with finger, move new images over old, zoom in zoom out, etc. Shown to map makers who were weeping with emotion. Great project. Consists of hardware, software and emotion.

Now working on a table that physically deforms the surface to show mountains. Audience oohs and aahs.

Brendan Eich.

Key idea is that Firefox is a development platform. Using XUL, RDF and Javascript. And most extensions ship with source so anyone can view source and extend them.

Build with web technologies as well as C++. Lowers the barrier to entry.

Firefox 1.2 may have a Python language I/F. Much clapping from the audience.

Flickr. Everybody keeps asking who's buying them. Ask again and you'll get biffed! Stewart Butterfield.

Web Services as a strategy for startups. From day 1 business plan included APIs.

4.5% of all Flickr traffic is API traffic.

He didn't show anything I hadn't already seen. Except this. http://www.krazydad.com/squaredcircle/

More ideas per minute than I can track! Lots of people here. Not enough seats in the hall...

Stuff on O'Reilly's radar.

Patterns. Each pattern is a 3 part rule. Context+Problem+Solution. Leads to proscription.

- Design for participation. Allow what you're doing to be extended by others.
- User-Centred development. Release early, release often. Involve your users in the development process. Open, CVS, Patch acceptance.
- Glue small pieces to build your app but don't stop the next people from gluing your service with others.
- The Perpetual Beta. Fold in new features as they're ready. Or even if they're not ready. Some systems like del.icio.us don't say "beta" but they are.
- Users add value to shared data. Get lock in from secondary systems using your APIs not from hiding data. (LinkedIn pay attention!). See Amazon vs Barnes and Noble. Amazon putting distance from the competition because they open up. Flickr getting added value from customer work.
- Networks effects by default. Only a small number of people will add value deliberately. So architect to make participation the default. See Flickr and Napster/Kazaa. Default to sharing not privacy.
- The Long Tail. JB: Note that nobody's doing any work AFAIK to analyse the laws controlling the long tail beyond looking at the top 10% and Pareto. How does the data spread along the other 90%
- Target software beyond the single device. It's not *just* the browser on a PC any more.
- Social networking. This area sucks! Social networks should be a by-product of social applications not explicit. See http://etech.inroomchat.org/chatlogs/ Aggregated Social activity around the conference. Flickr+IRC+Technorati+del.icio.us
- Data is the next "Intel Inside".
- Packets and shipping containers. The death of enteprise software as we know it. Why does ES have to be re-invented every 5 years when TCP/IP is 30 years old. Understand the optimum packet size for application modules.
- Make money from the smallest atomic unit. Music Biz.
- AJAX. combining javascript with just in time data delivery. See Google Suggest.

Don't open the box and break the "warranty seal". It keeps the magic in. But the hacker imperative is that when you open the box, that's when the magic starts.

Mass Amateurization. It's not just the geeks any more taking things apart and recombining them. Really powerful things happen when the amateurs open the box.

Alpha Geeks are consumer 0. Now consumer one are doing things like swapping the hard drive on their cameras.

Why now.
- 20 years into the PC era.
- Given enough eyeballs, all features are obvious
- Advent of the lazyweb. Somebody, somwhere knows how to do it
- Gospel of openness is spreading.

So why Remix rather than hack?
- Remixing is inherently more conversational than hacking.

Examples
- Remix the web. View source.
- Firefox and Thunderbird
- Javascript. Google Suggest.
- Desktop integration. Google, MSN, Yahoo desktop search with browser as the interface
- Music Mashups and MP3 sample sharing. Customers and Biz weren't listening. But Apple was.
- Remix your TV. Tivo. leaves things open enough to do 30 sec skip through adverts.
- Remix your network. Wifi, Hotspots. Intel Brands Wifi. Apple do Airport express.
- Remix movies. BitTorrent. Video on demand. Netflix. Everyone teams with everyone else. Swarmcasting.
- Remix your data. Open APIs from Amazon. Small pieces lossely joined.
- Remix your text. I'm blogging this. Mass amateurism
- Remix syndication. RSS to desktop aggregators, to shared, to MyYahoo.
- Remix your bookshelf. Convert all text ever to digital. Project Gutenberg, Amazon search inside the book.
- Remix IT. Slew of specialists. Be liberal in what you accept, rigorous in what you put out. Hacks become frameworks. Raw material (opens ource code snippets), Nothing ever lost.
- Remix the browser. Firefox is an application environment.
- Remix Bricks and mortar. Anyone without an online presence will fade into the background.
- Remix Space Burt Rutan and Spaceship One.

Be unreasonable. And dis-satisfied. And fix it.

So here I am in San Diego at ETCon. Mirror world is how I remember it. Everything's backwards. The light switches, the taps, they way they drive. And why does this whole country smell of cinammon? Is that a puritan thing?

The flight was the usual painful experience. Way too much queueing and standing around. US airport Security is getting quite bizarre. Removing your shoes to go through the metal detector. And no bic lighters allowed.

And it begins. with Rael Dornfest.

Areatags.zip.

A simple textarea enhancement that adds a toolbar above the textarea that inserts html tags into the textarea text.

Works with IE6 and mozilla based browsers.

The optional patch to common.inc moves the toolbar to between the title and textarea.

Zip file at http://www.voidstar.com/downloads/folksonomy_1.zip.

Overview
This set consists of three items
- taxonomy.module.patch
A patch to taxonomy to stop it generating form elements for vocabularies that are from modules taxonomy or forum.

- folksonomy.module
A module to provide folksonomy support to contrib modules. Requires taxonomy

- folkterms.module
A module that demonstrates adding folksonomies to nodes using folksonomy.module.

Install
- Unzip this into the modules directory
- Enable folksonomy and folkterms
- In admin go to folksonomy and create a vocabulary
- Go to a node and start adding terms

Approach
- Uses taxonomy vocabulary and term tables to store all data.
- Creates term entries on the fly

Problems
- taxonomy wants to create form entries for all vocabularies but we want to do this ourselves. Hence the patch.

- Taxonomy deletes all term_node entries for a node when doing node update. So even if we create them, taxonomy will then delete them again. There's a nasty hack in the code to merge in the term tids into node->taxonomy before taxonomy does it's save and it then saves them for us. this relies on folksonomy beginning with F which becomes before T so that during hook_nodeapi, we'll always get called first.

- The's another nasty hack that I don't fully understand to get preview to show the terms in our folksonomy edit as well as those in the taxonomy edits.

- The term display on nodes uses term IDs for the URL eg ./taxonomy/term/12 But I'd rather use something like ./folksonomy/tags/p2p where tags is the name of the vocab and p2p is the name of the term.

- There's no easy way to get into the taxonomy pager display to add the sort of right hand margin that del.icio.us uses to show related and my terms. The only way I can think at the moment is to use a block that watches for the URLs we want to enhance. The other option is to create a taxonomy hook 'pre pager' that's just before taxonomy_render_nodes.

- The node display of taxo terms jumbles all the terms for all vocabs together with no indication of which vocab they came from. I'd like to see something like
forum:support category:documentation tags:module development hook

- If we want to cache count and related for each term, then we'll probably need additional tables.

Game Plan
I think this is the right long term approach. So the sequence is
1) Build proof of concept folksonomy.modules
2) Hack patches into taxonomy as we need them
3) Merge the finished folksonomy.module back into taxonomy

With the long term goal being that taxonomy supports vocabs with an alternative folksonomy style data entry UI

AdBrite - The Internet's Ad Marketplace
I need to investigate this. AdSense is not earning me enough money. [from: del.icio.us]

I'm Backing Blair because there's


So the government and Blair have managed to force through their terror bill. They pulled out all the stops but in the end they simply out manouvered the spineless opposition. Bear in mind here that there were moments when there were enough Labour MPs going against their party line that one of the votes was carried with a majority of just 14. But sadly Charles Kennedy didn't even bother to turn up that day along with 11 other Lib-Dem MPs.

I'm also Backing Blair because


Now we hear that pressure was applied by Downing St on Railtrack to remove speed restrictions and accept a higher degree of risk after the Hatfield disaster. Well that's certainly one way of trying to get the trains to run on time.

So make no mistake about it. This is the cult of Blair we're talking about here. Vote him out even if it means the Labour party goes too. Because this country is not well served by someone who's tough on blame and tough on the causes of blame.

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.

Backing Blair Video II: Unbelievable

Another fine flash vid from Tim Ireland.

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]

Amazon meets Google Suggest meets AJAX
Very cool hack [from: del.icio.us]