Open Tech 2005 - 23rd July in Hammersmith
NTK, BBC Backstage, UK Unix UG, together ... at last ... for a NotCon Sequel [from: del.icio.us]

In my never ending search for better slogans and epigrams, I thought up another one.

Don't give me ads in feeds, give me a feed of ads.

This is a reaction to Google adsense in feeds and the generally poor quality of adsense ads on blogs. I don't want to abuse my readers either here or on Ecademy even for money. But I do already take several composite feeds on specialist subjects from places like topix, del.icio.us, scraped Google News and so on. So why not have an associated feed of new ads from people working in those niches?

BTW. My favourite bit of advice comes form matchboxes. "Keep dry and away from children". A perfect rule to live by for most of us. Today I noticed that my lighter was trying to tell me something as well. There in Caps is KEEP AWAY FROM CHILDREN. How can I ignore this?

BTW2. So I edited this and AdSense has already targeted the post with the completely worthless:-

News Feeds. Great deals on News Feed. Shop on eBay and save.

Yeah, right. What is the point? I mean really, WHAT IS THE POINT?

The next Ecademy Event features Cory Doctorow. Cory has very kindly given us a link on my long time favourite weblog, BoingBoing.

Places are limited for this event so get your registration in now. [from: JB Ecademy]

Do you run Skype as well as an Instant Messenger like MSN Messenger, AOL, ICQ, Yahoo Messenger?

I bet you don't use the Instant Messenger any more.

So why not just turn it off? [from: JB Ecademy]

Roadcasting
links to last.fm? [from: del.icio.us]

This system has some nice UI, but the thinking doesn't look to me as though it's any more clever than last.fm. And they're glossing over exactly how "you can listen to anyone in a 30 mile range" as there's no info about the broadcast technology.

I've been playing with Google Maps. Along the way this web service kind of dropped out of the code.

Google Maps Address to Lat/Long convertor

It's a demo guys. Please don't hammer it. Feel free to copy the code and do whatever you like with it.

The trick is to request the javascript from google maps with http://maps.google.com/maps?output=js&q= and then look for the <center> tag which contains the lat/long.

Demo One for Unofficial Google Maps Embedding How To
[from: del.icio.us]

WigiWigi :: Index
Skype Video [from: del.icio.us]

Fascinating idea just turned up on Tribe Social Software Intellectuals.

What if Google Adsense had an RSS feed of Ads by keyword? Wouldn't you love to have a feed of people advertising in your chosen niche? With a bit of RSS-Fu you could put a stream of Ads on your blog or site that represented your view of what your site was about as an alternative to Google's view. Looks like Publisher Driven Advertising to me.

And the moment we mention keywords, surely tags are not far behind. There's something interesting in the intersection of folksonomy and adverts. Just not quite sure what it is yet.

Been meaning to post this for a few days.

Marc's Voice: ID Gang : We discussed providing a governance and technical due diligence entity that could keep Microsoft honest in their upcoming identity standard efforts - InfoCards.

I've referred to InfoCards as a "big momma identity backplane" - which enables any sort of identity system - to jack into a backplane - which all other identity systems share.

...

Meanwhile all the other identity platforms were represented at the meeting, including Shibboleth, Liberty Alliance, i-names and Sxip - so you BET this standard is gonna have some traction.

I'll make sure XFN, FOAF and other bottoms up technologies (like LID) are included as well.

The one question we all have is - "will any of the big boys play along?"

My question for you, Marc is "will any of the small boys play along?" By which I mean Drupal, MT, Wordpress, phpBB, Nuke and all that other open source, long tail, cheap and cheerful goodness. And there's a related question here. "Do you think Ourmedia.org will be able to use Infocards?"

My guess is that IE only, MS Windows only on the desktop, WS-SOAP Stack based, and by implication MS Server only, will count you out. And it'll count me out as well. And it'll count out >60% of the market. And all that will be left is MSN, Hotmail, eBay and Amazon. Sound familiar? Is that the ghost of Hailstorm and Passport I can hear clinking outside the door?

So Google is beginning the same journey to the My Google Portal page that all the other portals and their My Pages have done.

I can see the reasoning and this has at least some merit. But I can't help thinking that they've got this back-asswords. What I want is Google-About-Me, not My-Google. A page for *other* people to see everything I do, not a page where I can do everything. Or as Marc Canter would say, a

Digital Lifestyle Aggregator

HOW-TO: Make your own annotated multimedia Google map - Engadget - www.engadget.com.
[from: del.icio.us]

Skype: be afraid: Corante > Get Real >

Why is Corante permanently broken? The comments forms don't work. The RSS is screwy. The site is slow.

Anyway here's a comment to the above article in response to a whole load of misinformation.

Let's try and get this right and get at the truth, please. There's a few too many half truths and "a competitor told me" stories in here.

- If you stop an app and then uninstall it there is *no way* it could still be using resources, tcp sockets or connections. The only possibility is that it left behind a trojan or other malware. There has never been any suggestion that Skype does this. if it's failing to uninstall correectly, then that's a bug. I'm sure they'd love to hear the details.

- If you're behind a firewall, you have a NATed IP address and you don't have large numbers of ports forwarded to your machine on your internet faceing router, there is no way Skype is going to make you a supernode. So any traffic is about your copy of Skype doing what it does in terms of displaying presence information and handling voice and chat calls. If you don't like it, sure uninstall.

- *If* you are a full peer in the internet, then Skype *may* make you a supernode. In some circumstances, this can generate large numbers of connections which *may* cause your machine or router problems. You may also end up passing < 5KBps of switching traffic. You will *not* be passing other people's voice calls.

I've got no connection with Skype beyond being a happy user who relishes the shake up they're giving the Telcos and IM companies. The detail above is true to the best of my knowledge and has been gleaned from scanning the Skype forums and talking to Skype specialists. If it's wrong, tell me.

No matter what form of vehicle I'm using for transport all the other forms of transports are clearly being used by idiots.

- When walking, the bloody cars, cycles, motorcycles, and even other walkers seem to go out of there way to annoy me. Did you ever try and look in the non-existant rear view mirror while walking? Have you ever bumped into someone who started walking backwards or just stopped for no obvious reason?

- When I'm cycling or motorcycling, the pedestrians seem to have a death wish, while the car drivers are all out to kill me or just plain get in the way. Why is it that Vans, 4*4s and especially the biggest Mercedes ae incapable of positioning themselves in the middle of their lane?

- When I'm driving, the damn motorcyclists scare the hell out of me, appearing out of nowhere and then cutting across me with inches to spare. And the cyclists are just plain invisible.

Seriously though as a cyclist the one thing that really winds me up is the car that accelerates to get past me before immediately braking hard to take a left hand turn.

And as for horses, we don't ride or drive on the fields, what the hell are they doing on the road? And the same goes for pedestrians. I don't ride on the pavement, what are they doing in the road?

The one that used to really excite me when commuting was people who play Frogger. Imagine the scene, It's the depth of winter, it's cold and wet and dark. The street lights are not all working. I'm coming down the outside of the traffic on my MegaScooter trying to peer between the raindrops on the visor and the flare from the badly adjusted headlights of the cars coming towards me. Standing in the middle of the road is a person of colour wearing a black coat, black jeans and a black bobble hat looking the other way waiting for the gap to appear in the traffic on the other half of the road so they can run across. This used to happen to me at least once a day in Stoke Newington when commuting from the City to the A10. If you routinely walk in London, please look both ways each time you walk into the gap between cars. That's next to each pavement AND the gap between lanes.

The other wind up is people who start walking before you get to them as they judge the gap to end up just behind you as they pass. On a motorcycle they represent an obstacle to avoid so you pull away from them, so now they can walk faster, so you pull across a bit more, so they can walk faster, so you're now on the wrong side of the road with cars coming towards you.

Having said all that, I really like riding cycles because you are almost completely anonymous, invisible and outside the law. You really have to wind up the police to ever get stopped and even then you'll only get a caution as prosecuting is just too much hassle. And I've only ever once been so under the influence that I couldn't ride a bike. Anything motorised and they have systems to deal with you. And as a pedestrian, you're at risk of the half hour stop and search or an overnight stay on sus. As good middle class citizens this probably no longer affects any of us, but it affects our teenage children and it's one to remember if you ever go on a march or decide to go somewhere vaguely illegal like Stonehenge at midsummer. Or Brixton/Toxteth/Handsworth.

<victor meldrew>And there's another thing... </victor meldrew>

Kim Cameron's Identity Weblog :

Kim believes that it has to be an entirely open system. My understanding is that Microsoft will find a license (I also understand they have not settled on one, in fact Kim is looking for input), that allows anybody to create any part or all of InfoCard themselves. Unlike some earlier rumors, InfoCard does not seem to be released as open source itself, but admittedly, that would really have surprised me.

Here is an example use case:

1. An InfoCard-enabled user (e.g. one running the upcoming Windows Longhorn, or the downward-compatible release for XP) first signs up with one or more identity providers of their choice. That could be their ISP, their bank, a site like eBay, or Slashdot. This process is entirely outside of InfoCard, but of course the identity provider must support their part of the InfoCard protocol.
2. The user visits an InfoCard-enabled relying website (such as an InfoCard-enabled Amazon) that requires certain identity information from the user, say, a shipping address. The website sends a web page which contains an HTML OBJECT tag, which triggers a DLL which invokes the InfoCard system.
3. The InfoCard system determines which personal information is requested by the website, and matches it to the identities (i.e. InfoCards) that are in possession of the user. It then displays those InfoCards to the user that are applicable, such as: driver's license (if the government was an InfoCard-enabled identity provider), or credit card from AMEX. Note that the InfoCard selector runs natively on the PC and is not downloaded.
4. The user selects an InfoCard to use. The dialog shown takes over the entire Windows screen (similar to the Windows login / logout dialogs today) in order to reduce phishing. It would also be difficult for an attacked to bring up a screen that has the exact set of InfoCard pictures on it as the user owns, as the information about which cards the user has is stored securely in a secure area of Windows. As a result of the selection, the InfoCard process on the PC contacts the selected identity provider, and obtains essentially a signed XML document that contains the requested identity information. The signature comes from the identity provider.
5. The InfoCard PC piece then forwards the obtained document to the relying party (the website).
6. However, InfoCard does not describe the actual tokens flying around, thereby enabling other identity systems to plug in.

In order to accomplish this, InfoCard employs:

* SOAP
* WS-Addressing
* WS-MetadataExchange
* WS-Policy
* WS-Security
* WS-SecurityPolicy
* WS-Transfer
* WS-Trust
* XML Signature
* XML Encryption

So:
- User end requires Longhorn or an XP upgrade
- Depends on SOAP and the WS protocol stack
- Uses HTML OBJECT tag wth DLL support
- Multiple commercial licensing but with probably no open, free, license.

So that counts out Apple and Linux clients. It may well count out Firefox and other browsers. It almost certainly counts out PHP-Apache websites. Java/Perl server environments probably won't work because interop between MS implementations of the WS stack with Java/Perl implementations is extremely patchy.

So >50% of the market is excluded. And *all* of the long tail of small and medium sized web sites. Which is exactly the same problem as with Passport. It ends up as an IE only, MS Windows only, client tied to a server system that only works with the very biggest players. And each one of them involves a huge sell with the corresponding bad press when they back out.

What's sad about this is that Microsoft cannot separate the standards process from it's commercial business. It's completely unable to take a view that a larger market raises all boats. So I'm not at all surprised at the approach and I also predict loads of noise and very little implementation leading to another failure. I think the rest of us can safely ignore what they're doing. While at the same time borrowing from all the excellent work that people like Kim Cameron are doing on the fundamental analysis of Identity.

yadis: yet another distributed identity system
From the LiveJournal guy, Brad Fitzpatrick [from: del.icio.us]

O'Reilly Radar > Google has del.icio.us tags and RSS feed autodiscovery

W00t! Is this real? Or has Rael got some Firefox add on that he didn't realize?

According to Rael, some google searches have added an XML icon if the target web page has an RSS/Atom feed. And an info button if it has del.icio.us links.

Shirky: Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags
More Shirky, taggy tasteiness [from: del.icio.us]

Doc has been writing about the perils of IQ tests. The Doc Searls Weblog : Saturday, May 14, 2005

I'm reminded of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. To paraphrase.

"I'm a Beta. Betas are the best. Those Alphas are so stuck up. They think they can do anything with their precious intelligence. I don't want to be a leader like them. I'm better being second. And Betas are so much better than those stupid Gammas. And as for the Deltas. Well somebody has to do all those terrible jobs like picking up the trash. And I'm glad it's not me. Yes. Betas are the best."

And I'm also reminded of one of Gurdjieff's teaching stories. As a kid he was out with his father and uncle in the fields listening to them talk.
Father: What is God doing now?
Uncle: He's making ladders.
Father: What are the ladders for?
Uncle: For the nations of the world to go up and down on.

It seem to me that IQ tests, streaming in schools and national propaganda are all aimed at the same thing and for very much the same reasons. They are simplistic techniques for telling us what to think. And they get used because it's a great deal easier than teaching us how to think.

Absolutely Del.icio.us - Complete Tool Collection
small pieces loosely joined [from: del.icio.us]