I was looking at the white space in ProgrammableWeb: Web 2.0 Mashup Matrix and noticed that Skype has almost no entries. but then I looked at the other IM services and they don't ay entries either. So what is it about Instant Messaging that makes Mashups with other Web APIs difficult? Well IM is yet another Identity name space and is predominantly about people. And very, very few systems (with or without APIs) allow you to search for people or retrieve data based on their IM address. The limit seems to be just inserting IM links into people's profiles and maybe showing their presence information. And like IRC, developing bots that embed some external function into an IM chat conversation.

Imagine you're looking at a blog post. There's a button on the page that says "Find more like this". It goes off to a search engine that returns articles like this one from all over the web.

How would you code this? Can you do it now? You could just take the title and do a google search on that but it clearly doesn't work. It really needs a service where you drop the whole text in and it does some lexical analysis on it to produce a search query.

While we're at it, why is Google Blogsearch so bad? Compare a search for Ecademy in Google Blogsearch and Technorati.

I've been thinking a lot about Marc Canter's latest rant about APIs in social networking sites. Where is the conversation happening about the design of these APIs? FOAFnet is dead. The individual bits like ID, Microformats and so on each have their own mailing lists and wikis. So where can I go to find out the latest state of the art thinking?

And on RSS, Atom and Google. Google Base (remember that?) uses RSS and RSS extensions as one alternative to code up entries. But instead of just giving them a URL to a feed, you have to ftp a file to them which they then take up to a day to process. This is all bassackwards isn't it?

What will happen to the recalled batteries? suggests that all those Sony/Apple/Dell batteries that are being recalled are really rather hazardous and will end up in some 3rd world landfill.

Well how about they give me a few thousand to use in my home brew electric vehicle? Mmm, cheap as chips high density LiOn batteries that probably won't explode. Lovely.

In fact why don't they just sell them on eBay with no warranty?

Thinking more about this, I bet a significant number end up in those slightly dodgy Tottenham Court road electrical shops that sell second hand computer bits.

Google Maps Mania
A blog about Google Maps Mashups [from: del.icio.us]

We had an outage of about an hour this morning from 7:15am to 8:15am. This was caused by our hosting provider, Globix, losing all connectivity in London. Needless to say this should never happen and affected a lot of other people besides Ecademy. [from: JB Ecademy]

Free Business idea #23: A Skype White Pages site. Mashed in with Google Maps. As the basis for a generic "About Me" system. that (with the members help) correlates Skype IDs with collections of data from all the other sites (Flickr, del.icio.us, etc, etc).

Why? Because Skype Search isn't good enough yet.

The Long Tail: What do people really want in music? :
# Airplay Charts: "Measure what people are being fed."
# Sales Charts: "Measure what people are eating from what they're being fed."
# Usage Charts: "Measure what, from the music people can listen to, they listen to the most."

Here's another few questions.
- What music are people creating?
- What music are people listening to live? (at concerts, bars, live performances)
- What music are people copying?
- What background music is being played at people? (in bars, restaurants, hotel foyers, shops)?
- What music is used as soundscapes in TV, film?

I really wish we could get some of the same metrics for books. The problem is that a book can't tell a computer that it's being read the way a piece of music can tell that it's being played.

And BTW. The whole "Music Genre" classification system is really screwed. It's ripe for tags. At which point see Last.FM.

Early in the summer, my son had a Bus-Headbutting incident when a local country bus pulled out of a side road to cross a main road without seeing him. The worst sort of SMIDSY accident. The bus was so close that he hit it straight and level, and was pole vaulted off the bike. Amazingly he was pretty much ok, but the bike is a right off.



The frame engine hangers shattered, the big frame weld on one side exploded and everything in front of the engine is destroyed.

So the challenge was to get him back on the road cheaply. By chance we came across an old work colleague of mine who had the same model CBR400RR growing spiders, mould and rust in his garage. It hadn't moved in 7 years after a couple of small accidents and being knocked over while parked. So this summer we've been resurrecting it.



Doesn't that matt black look good? Perhaps the biggest hassle in all this was cleaning the inside of the tank. The petrol remains were turning to varnish and took an awful lot of degreaser and washing out. The fork seals were quite a challenge. And of course there were loads of japanese fasteners that were turning to cheese. But in the end it's quite a result. With the good carbs from the old bike along with the fuel supply bits, it started straight up without even changing the plugs. And as far as I can tell it's not using much oil and revs out nicely (ahem!) once we added the Japanese derestrictor black box.

Now, does anyone need some old CBR400RR bits?

Marc points at l.m. orchard : Talking about the problems of creating the same profile data over and over again on social networking sites.

Here's the crucial part. But since then, I just haven't felt the need to replicate self-disclosure anywhere else but on my own site. We need both ends of this. We need the social networks to be able to import the data. But we also need the personal blog software to support an "About Me" page that maintains and publishes the master copy. There continue to be major challenges around this area.

- Master "About Me" page, with export, in common personal software
- Standards for either a schema to describe people or ways of building it on the fly
- Standards for transferring that data
- Implementation of account creation using profile data from elsewhere
- Ways of keeping everything in sync.

And this all raises questions of exactly where the data should reside. The sync problem suggests it should never move and stay on the master site. We'll just include it at run time. But that works against being able to generate added value from having lots of that data in one place. And there are commercial pressures pushing sites towards keeping their local copy.

Now you may say "we have standards". But right now they're all flawed and there's too many of them. FOAF, VCard, HCard, XFN, SXIP.

AllPeers is a BitTorrent based peer to peer file sharing app written as a Firefox extension. It's just hit limited Beta and I have invitations available. Drop me a line if you want one.

julian_bond at voidstar.com

Hair gel and iPods terror alert.
Supreme court finds warrant-less wire tapping unconstitutional.

Craig Murray seems to be off line. Or at least I can't get to the blog. Did it get Slashdotted/Dugg? UKPoliblog seems to still be picking up the RSS.

www.myspace.com/rizmc
Do the 911 dance [from: del.icio.us]

Looking at the cartoon below, I think it should be remixed with the text just slightly changed but the images taken from an engraving of the founding fathers. Or is that too ironic?

Ah yes. Almost British in it's sense of humour. And carrying an undercurrent of Truthiness. I mean, you gotta larf, right?



More seriously, keep racheting up the pain of airline travel and we'll solve global warming. Because you just know that the current regime is the new normal. They're never going to be able to chill out and stop worrying. So I guess that's it. No more Web 2.0 conferences in SilliValley for me.

So can you carry on supplies of Nicorette gum because I don't think I could survive a transatlantic flight without it along with a good book to read. Hmm. Foil packed squares of gum. Just right for my new plastic explosive. And how about ear plugs? Or my blow up travel pillow?

For the fourth time today I find myself saying "Just stop it guys, you're being stupid. It's not big and it's not clever. It's just stupid. Just stop it."

It's apparently time to wheel these out again.



Populace: How worried should we be?
Government: Very, very worried. But just try to carry on as normal.

The Observer Via Kim Cameron's Identity Weblog » Tales from beyond the crypt : Gordon Brown is planning a massive expansion of the ID cards project that would widen surveillance of everyday life by allowing high-street businesses to share confidential information with police databases.

Far from intending to dump ID cards once he is in Downing Street, Brown is quietly studying how biometric technology - identifying people by unique markers such as fingerprints and iris patterns - could be expanded over the next 20 years to fight crime.

Police could be alerted instantly when a wanted person used a cash machine or supermarket loyalty card. Cars could be fingerprint-activated, making driving bans much harder to disobey.

The plan would make the ID cards scheme cheaper, since companies would pay for access to the national identity register - a government database of biometric information being compiled for the ID cards programme. Brown's plans belie reports that the Treasury, concerned about the cost of ID cards, would ditch them when he became Prime Minister. It's almost the opposite - Gordon's thinking about ID cards is that it's part of the answer but there's a much wider picture, said a source close to him.

I hesitate to suggest this, but what's dropping out of this is that the government needs to do nothing more than enact a couple of laws. The one's that say that any corporate ID / tracking system must include a backdoor that provides access to law enforcement and that any unusual transactions (volume or size) are automatically reported in near real time. That way they can avoid all the costs and maintenance issues.

In some jurisdictions, actually passing the laws is optional. The government just has to ask nicely and the corporations (I'm looking at you AT&T) willingly hand over the data.

BTW. What is it about Social Security numbers? You have to hand them out frequently to people who can barely be trusted (like your employer) So what's the big deal? Aren't they pretty much something like a Bank account number that is useless in isolation?

First the story. Last weekend I went to a party given by an old friend. I know his taste in music is thin and poor but I also know that he's got a seriously high end stereo, DVD, TV system. So I took my trusty hacked 80Gb Zen Xtra with the 65Gb of music along with assorted leads. The one lead I didn't take was a 3.5mm jack to phono and anyway trying to find spare phono inputs in the back of his fitted mega-stereo was a pain. Aha, I thought, I'll use the mini FM transmitter out of the car. Except that his tuner is DAB and it doesn't have a plain old VHF-FM section. And anyway the antenna is in the roof space and is a high gain directional item.

The second story is Ford. The new shape Focus (and others) came with a new shape radio that had a CD Jukebox connector but they never actually made the jukebox. They haven't sold enough of them for any of the CD Jukebox to iPod people to produce a convertor. One year in, they changed it to one with an Aux connector but didn't actually wire in the Aux socket. Finally, they are now putting Aux sockets in the glovebox. The radio being a new shape requires much fiddling with new tools to extract and replace. And I'm trying to track down a cheap late model Ford radio to replace my early one.

And the moral of all this is. MP3 players are now everywhere. Which means that every sound device (radios, stereos, ICE, boomboxes, PCs) should come with an AUX IN 3.5mm jack socket on the front of the box. By all means add an iPod specific adapter, but please put in the 3.5mm jack as well. So why don't they?

And while we're at it. Please put headphone jacks in cars for the passengers[1].

[1]Is it illegal in the UK to wear earphones while driving? Never mind if it's sensible or not, is it illegal?

Martin Geddes writes. Skype Journal: From little seeds do great ideas grow : True or false? You decide.

There will be three desktop clients through which you conduct your life. Browser wars ("Episode 1" ... or was that 4?) was only the beginning.

* The browser. "Their stuff" -- your lens on the outside world -- discover, read, and transact.
* The messenger. "Our stuff" -- your lens into your social world -- connect and converse.
* The manager. "My stuff" -- your lens onto your own digital artifacts -- search, edit and view.

Look at it from your point of view.
- Read
- Communicate
- Create
- Profile

Now look at it from "Their" point of view.
- Create
- Communicate
- Read
- Discover

It's useful to do One-Few-Many analysis on this. One-Few-Many publishers reaching One-Few-Many consumers. Skype is mostly One-To-One with some Few-To-Few and One-To-Many aspects.

There's a piece of this puzzle that is missing and that's publishing your profile; A public About Me page. All the portals are focussed on collecting everything you might read in one place. The "My Page". Nobody focusses on the reverse, collecting everything I create in one place *for other people* to read about me.

InformationWeek | DRM | Opinion: Apple's Copy-Protection Isn't Just Bad For Consumers, It's Bad For Business | July 26, 2006
Another great Anti-DRM rant from Cory. [from: del.icio.us]

I've just been playing with last.fm again. It's had another revamp and is getting seriously good. If you've been there and drifted away, look again. If you've never been, go now.

Currently listening to a composite tag radio station Called "Cocktails at Sunset".