Breaking the Web Wide Open! (complete story) :: AO
Excellent summary of the state of the internet as of Summer '05 [from: del.icio.us]

NY Times Meet the lifehacker. Read it quick before it disappears behind the pay wall.

When Mark crunched the data, a picture of 21st-century office work emerged that was, she says, "far worse than I could ever have imagined." Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What's more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task. To perform an office job today, it seems, your attention must skip like a stone across water all day long, touching down only periodically.

So clear some time in your day. Put Skype on DND and turn off all notifications in Skype and any other IM programs. Turn off your email reader or at least turn down the notifications. You don't need to read your email *now*. Turn off your Blackberry and mobile phone. Take the phone off the hook or divert it to voice mail. Put on the noise cancelling headphones. Close that browser with 76 tabs open. Resist the urge to just open your RSS news reader one last time.

It now takes about 15 minutes to get in the zone where you're totally focussed on the job in hand. Don't let anything distract you for the next 1 hour and 45 minutes.

Now go for a short walk round the garden to decompress, make another coffee, turn it all back on again and step back into the firehose. [from: JB Ecademy]

To anyone who thinks Blog Spam isn't a problem take a look at this.

Google Blog Search: ecademy -site:*.ecademy.com

I take an RSS feed from this page to spot anyone who mentions Ecademy in a blog with anything from the ecademy.com domain removed. It's now completely unuseable because somebody has built a robot which is signing up Blogger accounts and using the same text that just happens to include "Ecademy". They're building at least 10 new blog sites per day.

Given that Google own both Google BlogSearch and Blogger this is undeniably their problem. It may also be weblogs.com and the other ping service's problem.

Google Blog search is amazingly fast at indexing new blog pages. It's also now completely useless.

ProgrammableWeb.com : Perhaps the most notable part of the story is towards the end when discussing how Trulia, a for-profit business and not just a hobbyist site, is beginning to run into one of the core mashup issues: data ownership, royalties, and how to share revenue. As their business grows, Google has expressed an interest in sharing.

There's an issue here that is raising it's ugly head.

When an API is provided by a commercial company, to what extent should they be entitled to share in profits generated by a commercial company using it?

My gut feel is "None, No way". If they want to share in the profits they can buy me. And/Or they should share *their* profits with me because I've made their service more valuable.

I'm deeply hacked off with UK politics, in fact I'm f**king pissed off.

On Tuesday night there was a critical ID card vote before the bill goes off to the House of Lords. It seems to have been a fairly free vote with no major whip activity. There were a number of Labour rebels and with the Tories and Lib-Dems voting solidly against, the government majority was reduced to 25. But and it's a huge But, 41 Tories didn't vote including all the leadership candidates. They had an opportunity to inflict a major, embarrassing and humiliating defeat on the government and they blew it. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE? The opposition is unbelievably ineffective and they keep on being ineffective. I've no doubt that the major reason they didn't bother to vote is that they are so wrapped up and self absorbed in imploding around their leadership race. Well, hello, guys. Wake up. The business of politics has to continue even if you're distracted by what Cameron did 20 years ago.

Parliamentary democracy is fairly flawed but it's the best system we've got. But when you voted for an elected politician and they then don't bother to exercise *their* vote, what's the f*cking point? Which made the article next to the report in The Times particularly apt. "Britain is witnessing the emergence of 'Generation No-X' - Young people who never acquire the habit of voting."

Interesting problem we hit on Ecademy. We have private clubs where the discussion is supposed not to be world viewable. Normally club discussions are available via RSS. So inevitably there are people (like me) who would rather keep up with new posts via RSS and wanted RSS of the private club posts as well. The first attempt added parameters for ID+password: if it validated you got the posts. Not terribly secure but it worked. But then somebody posted the URL to Newsgator web and they started spidering the feed so that all the posts were now turning up in their public search. Oooops! I switched to HTTP AUTH, but had real problems getting PHP to accept it in a form where I could validate it. All the different news readers seemed to have subtly different ways of passing the auth data and I frequently never got the data in PHP.

Now although most of the news readers support AUTH and do the right thing by not making the data public, I have no control over this. Once that data gets out via another route from the plain old HTML, and is read by somebody else's code, it's effectively public. The only reason we can rely on browsers to respect HTTP AUTH is that once accepted we can be reasonably sure that it is only displayed on the screen of the person entering the password. But even that is questionable when things like CURL and wget can be used.

So the end result is that I'd advise people to back away from private feeds and just not provide them. Which is something of a problem as there is a definite need for private RSS.

Why is the weblog calandar control so prevalent in weblog UI design? It's a particularly useless way of navigating somebody else's blog.

It's OK to have it there because I can just about imagine a need. But it shouldn't be the primary way of walking though people's posts. We need to focus on VCR or Page number navigation first backed up with tag browsing and good search.

Interesting page on 43 Folders

Ah, the Digital Lifestyle Aggregator page.

The major blogging packages have really not addressed the "About Me" page to any great extent. Picture what might be:-
- Structured CV and Profile data in human and machine readable format. (vcard, hCard, FOAF, whatever)
- Personal Identity Server using one of the low end SSO systems like SXIP, OpenID, LID, TypeKey.
- Aggregated RSS for your activity on the web. Flickr, del.icio.us, plazes, last.fm, Amazon wishlist, other blogs, blogrolling.com, RSS subscription lists, etc etc. Custom services to things like IM status.
- Aggregating in arbitrary plain text lists as described above or with a real database and web UI
- Arms length contact me form that lets people leave a private message without exposing your email address

At the moment, weblogs are still just focussed on the personal publishing angle. We need to beef up the periphery and take them to the next stage. People are doing this ad hoc with sidebar applets, so it clearly should get baked into the core distributions. It's also a natural for the big hosted systems like MSN Spaces.

One other similar need is the ability to automatically generate blog posts from blogs posted elsewhere on other systems. So if I post a blog on Ecademy or Tribe it should automatically appear in my home blog.

Lots of potential code here. Somebody pick it up!

ps. Here's the start of what I'm doing at Ecademy to support this.

Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
I need to write about how useless the calendar is in weblog UI [from: del.icio.us]

What a year. First there was the Tsunami. Then Katrina. And Rita, And Stan. And Wilma.

Meanwhile there are 40,000 already dead in Pakistan in one of the most inhospitable and remote areas of the world as it heads into winter.

It's instructive to think about which ones got the most media coverage.

And then go to DEC and donate.

I'm an extra-terrestrial from a civilization approximately 10 million years older than yours.

Now what question are you going to ask me?

David Sifry has posted his quarterly round up of the blogging world. The figures are simply staggering.

* As of October 2005, Technorati is now tracking 19.6 Million weblogs
* The total number of weblogs tracked continues to double about every 5 months
* The blogosphere is now over 30 times as big as it was 3 years ago, with no signs of letup in growth
* About 70,000 new weblogs are created every day
* About a new weblog is created each second
* 2% - 8% of new weblogs per day are fake or spam weblogs
* Between 700,000 and 1.3 Million posts are made each day
* About 33,000 posts are created per hour, or 9.2 posts per second
* An additional 5.8% of posts (or about 50,000 posts/day) seen each day are from spam or fake blogs, on average

At this rate, I figure we're about 3 to 6 years away from one blog for every person on the planet.

The spam problem is becoming significant. It's become way too easy to create robot driven spam blogs (Splogs) on Blogspot to generate Google page rank for dubious websites. And so yet another medium is polluted by the excesses of the few. [from: JB Ecademy]

University of Cambridge department bans Skype, citing security concerns | connect.educause.edu : University of Cambridge department bans Skype, citing security concerns

The Physics dept of Cambridge University (My alma mater) has banned Skype citing the EULA and the possibility of relaying as a supernode. This is couched with language that suggests there's a potential security risk. in the middle there's this statement. Users were alerted to recent security compromises and back-door intrusion attempts on machines running Skype. Really? If this was true surely it would reach the mainstream web coverage of Skype?

Now presumably Cambridge runs firewalls? And they use VPNs? And NAT? In which case there's zero possibility of a connected computer becoming a supernode and relaying traffic. And I know they do because I've tried to connect to CU Wifi that was apparently open but walled off as soon as you tried to connect.

And even if a connected machine did become a supernode, any intrusion via that route would a be a huge source of concern for both Skype and the Skype community.

This just looks like more scare stories to me from a party with too much control and some vested interest.

Anyone want to join in on a Web2.0 project in php-mysql? If we start soon, we can launch at EtCon 2006 and then sell out to Yahoo at Etcon 2007.

Over the weekend I knocked up an OPML browser. Still not quite sure what it's for or if it's useful.
http://www.voidstar.com/opml/

Things I noted mostly to do with validation against Dave's proposals.

- OPML not served with an XML content type so that the browser doesn't know how to display it.

- Wholesale abuse of the Type attribute. There's lots of OPML out there with a type of LINK pointing at RSS.

- I could do with a list of all possible values of TYPE. Is there only LINK and RSS?

- Confusion over the use of URL, XMLURL and HTMLURL. Most of the OPML I've looked at uses only URL even for feeds.

- The lack of a HEAD.DESCRIPTION element.

- All the same issues as in RSS around the inclusion of HTML in the TITLE and DESCRIPTION elements.

- Confusion over the use of the TITLE vs TEXT elements. They seem to be interchangeable.

- Using the file extension to identify the target URL type as another OPML file seems old fashioned. Particularly where the target URL is so rarely a static file but much more likely to be a RESTful directory or CGI string. I think it would be more useful to be explicit and use a TYPE attribute of OPML to tell the reader what's at the other end.

Overall the OPML standard badly needs some more concise guidelines, validation and for people to go round and complain when well known OPML feeds don't follow them.

A web site which should exist; Last.Fm for books.

Last.fm works so well because it's easy to automatically find out what people are listening to. The challenge with books is to get people to tell you manually what they are currently reading.

I picture a collection of things like bookmarklets where I can browse Amazon or isbn.nu for the book I'm currently reading and then tell an API on your site the ISBN number. There's also a system in the USA (I
forget exactly where) for building an inventory of books (among other things) by scanning the barcodes with a small cuecat reader or by using a mobile phone camera.

Once you have data like that there's a raft of possibilities around recommendations for book reading, social networking based on reading habits, reviews and gossip, tagging and so on. http://www.whatshouldireadnext.com/ is a start but there's way more potential here.

Anyone want to try and build it with me?

http://www.alwayson-network.com/comments.php?id=P12063_0_4_0_C
http://www.alwayson-network.com/comments.php?id=12132_0_1_0_C
http://www.alwayson-network.com/comments.php?id=12133_0_1_0_C

Part 4 due shortly. This is essential reading and full of links for anyone interested in where Web 2.0 is right now and where this is all going.

Boing Boing: Model railroader's model slums : This model railroad hobbyist makes miniature slum-scenes for his trains to roll through, replete with liquor stores, blowing trash and graffiti.

I should note here that this is the real USA and not the image of perfectly manicured 'Burbs full of tortured souls obssessing over their next SUV purchase and divorce settlement that we are fed via the global lamestream media complex. Fly into just about any major US city and the taxi ride to your hotel more than likely goes through neighbourhoods that look like a third world warzone. New York is particularly bad for this.

Kevin Burton's Feed Blog: What is TailRank?
What is TailRank? Indeed! [from: del.icio.us]

Guidelines for validating OPML
For some reason that I'm not really clear on, I have this desire in the back of my head to build a PHP OPML navigator [from: del.icio.us]