I was at Advertising 2.0 yesterday. It was after the company Christmas lunch so if I was tired and emotional, I apologise :) Some thoughts:-

eBay are polluting the online advertising market by posting very large numbers of very generic ads. They have a huge number of potential advertisers in that every person who posts a auction is a potential advertiser. So they should turn their advertising department from a cost centre into a profit centre. Either by competing with Google AdSense or by acting as an intermediary for them and offering a cost plus service to advertise specific auctions.

The advertising industry talks a lot about Advertisers and Agencies on one side with customers and their eyeballs on the other. But this game has 3 legs and they hardly ever talk about the 3rd leg; Publishers. And frankly advertising currently sucks from the point of view of the publisher.

Consider three examples.
- Ecademy is a social network for business people. Predominantly sole traders and SMEs. It's a site solidly in the Fat Middle of the Long Tail curve. Finding and serving appropriate advertising is hard. And Google AdSense is too tightly targeted. Ecademy's members don't take kindly to advertising for their competitors on their pages.
- UK Poli Blogs is one of the best aggregators of Political blog thought in the UK. AdSense tries hard but is largely ineffective.
- This weblog is fairly focussed so why do I only get Ads for blog hosting?

Wouldn't it be nice if a publisher could click on an Ad and say "Show this Ad and ones like it on my site"

Maybe Ad Agencies should morph their offering so it's more of a partnership. They could do what they do now. But also provide Ad Serving for campaigns which the publisher sells direct at a reduced margin.

TechCrunch UK » Blog Archive » Putting TechCrunch UK on Hold

Sam Sethi fired from TechCrunch. More at 11.

Community management is a bitch! Which means there's a business opening for somebody who can provide a community outsourcing system for BigCorps where you take all the pain that they can't handle. BigCorps (like, say, Ford, NTL, BT) desperately need to engage with their customers but it's pretty much impossible for them to do while remaining fair and keeping the PR department happy.

Which makes this little spat all the more ironic. Here we are in the leading edge group, breaking new ground and trying to spread the word about community software and we can't even manage our own little problems of conflict of interest and criticism.

Loic, Mike and Sam could help us all in this business by taking a deep breath and staying away from the keyboard for 24 hours.

Slashdot | Liquid Terror Charges Dropped

A Pakistani judge has decided to drop terrorism charges against the man described as a "key figure" in the alleged plan to blow up flights out of London using liquid explosives. Instead of facing charges of terrorism for the plot, which forced many travelers to follow strict guidelines with respect to liquids, Rashid Raud now faces charges such as forgery. From the article: "Several commentators said the threat was deliberately exaggerated to bolster the anti-terror credentials of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and that it helped to demonise British Muslims of Pakistani origin. The Crown Prosecution Service in the UK said the dropping of charges against Mr Rauf in Pakistan would "make no difference" to the case against the men charged in Britain."

So what has happened to the men charged in the UK?

Anil Dash: How Matt Haughey Beat Google :

Google doesn't have a community to leverage.

Now there's a thought. Is that what they were really buying when they bought YouTube? Because apart from Orkut, I can't think of a single Google community that actually has any community element.

digg - Kazakhstan and Russia Start Uranium Venture : Kazakhstan has 30 percent of the world's proven uranium reserves.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

Wired News: Gadgets Built to Fail : Someday, much sooner than you'd like, that shiny new toy you just bought will break. When it happens, you'll swear, you'll cry -- then you'll sigh and open your wallet. You've been here before, with the jammed Walkman, the DOA answering machine, the fritzed digicam, the blue screen of death.

Let's call it the buy-die-buy theory: Manufacturers design technology to fail so you're forced to upgrade regularly.

This is beginning to really upset me. It's one thing to have this happen with a 25 quid Walkman or a 50 quid CD Walkman. it's quite another when it's 250 quid of iPod or 1000 quid of laptop.

What ever happened to consumer durables.

Maybe if Manufacturers followed the Make manifesto, it wouldn't be so hard to take.

I've been reading a report about the UK Gower Report on Copyright. These things caught my eye.

Gowers wants to see a private copying exception written into copyright law. That was expected and will find no opposition from the UK music industry. Currently, copying from your own CD to your hard drive and MP3 player is infringement, though the music industry turns a blind eye. Gowers wants the law to reflect reality: "private copying should enable users to copy media on to different technologies for personal use," says the report.

So far so good.

What is more controversial is that Gowers sees no need for an accompanying copyright levy. In France, Germany and many other countries, private copying is allowed but compensated by a tax on blank media. The Copyright Directive says member states can choose to forbid private copying or allow it – provided there is fair compensation for right holders. Gowers believes that compensation can be won another way.

His report explains: "If rightholders know in advance of a sale of a particular work that limited copying of that work can take place, the economic cost of the right to copy can be included in the sale price. The 'fair compensation' required by the Directive can be included in the normal sale price."

Kim Walker, head of Intellectual Property with Pinsent Masons, said: "He's saying the price of CDs will go up."

It may be that music purchased as a download is less frequently burned to CD than music purchased as a CD is ripped to another device – so the price rise may not affect iTunes. Gowers also warns that any private right to copy "cannot be extended retrospectively as copies of works already sold would not include this 'fair compensation'."

Ooops! That's impossible to enforce. Either it's legal to copy to another format or it isn't. Applying it retrospectively or not doesn't work.

Walker said: "You can rip CDs bought after the law changes – which Gowers hopes will be by 2008. But you also need to pay to legalise your current collection."

The report states: "collecting societies may wish to consider making a single block licence available to allow consumers to format shift their back catalogues legitimately."

This is ridiculous! No way am I (or anyone else) going to buy a license to rip my old CDs to Mp3.

Walker says he could be deliberately provoking the music industry here. "Would it dare to hike the prices of CDs and blame this new right to make private copies?," said Walker. "Would it have the audacity to demand a lump of cash from each of us for the right to keep playing our existing collections of ripped music?"

And he knows it's ridiculous.

AIM, a trade body for independent music labels, criticised Gowers yesterday for his dismissal of levies. "The fact that these levies, across the board, may be judged to be working imperfectly and arguably may require some reform, rationalisation (possibly even replacement by some system which fulfils the objective more efficiently or imaginatively) does not detract from the essential justice of their existence," it said in a statement. It fears the change could open the floodgates to uncontrolled and unstoppable private copying and sharing from person to person, as well as format to format. "Once owned, however acquired, music will be passed on freely," said AIM.

I'm really quite surprised the AIM said this. I'd have thought they would understand better the natur eof the changes in the business. Apparently not and apparently they have the same attitudes as the BPI, RIAA et al.

Gowers addresses peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing, but sees no need for immediate changes to the law. Some have called for a new law to make those who facilitate P2P file-sharing liable for copyright infringement.

Gowers favours self-regulation. The ISP Association is encouraging ISPs and rights owners to cooperate on a Best Common Practice document that will address P2P abuse. Gowers sees this as a good way to change public attitudes and behaviours without court action. Only if there is a failure to agree would Gowers advocate new statutory controls.

Woah, Nelly. This is a slippery road that leads to problems with Net Neutrality. I'm vehemently against drawing the ISPs into this. I believe it's better for everyone if the ISPs are treated as common carriers and are not expected to police use of their networks. We already have plenty of law that allows an organisation (or the police) that believes a crime or copyright infringement is taking place to get a court to order an ISP to provide information. We do not need to turn the ISPs into the Police. But maybe this is what Gower is actually saying. We don't need new law. If the BPI and ISP associations reach a business agreement to control P2P, the government doesn't need to step in to force it. Our beef then moves (or stays) with the BPI and the ISPs and whatever deals they do.

This particular argument is extraordinarily difficult to have with otherwise intelligent people. Repeatedly, I get accused of supporting organised crime and counterfeiting when I question whether the ISPs should automatically give up information about their customers or turn off accounts on demand. We don't seem to be able to separate criminals selling counterfeit goods over the net and private individuals sharing for free via P2P.

But really, all this is moot. We'll all go on ripping our CDs to Mp3, buying from Russian sites, and passing the Mp3s to each other via thumb drive, portable hard drive, or DVD. All that activity is already extremely widespread and completely under the radar. The question is whether the law will be changed to recognise that we're all criminals now.

First the question. Does anyone make a twin tuner Freeview recorder with a hard disk that will also record from SCART Video-In?

And now the background and perhaps the answer. Some Far East manufacturer has come up with a board and reference design that has been boxed and labelled by lots of suppliers. A classic example is the Evesham PVR160. It's a great piece of kit that's amazingly cheap at UKP150. But there's one catch that affects anyone with 3rd party content feeds (eg NTL, Sky, Telewest, old video tapes etc). It's got two scarts but they are both Video *Out* only. One's for feeding the TV, the other is for feeding a VCR or DVD-Writer for archiving recordings. What you can't do is record from either of the SCARTs. This feels really dumb to me. It would have taken only a small bit of hardware and software to do this. When did you last see a VHS or DVD recorder that *wasn't* able to record from SCART.

It seems that every low end FreeView HDD recorder uses the same board and has the same limitation. If you look at the higher end HDD recorders, as far as I can tell none of them have on board freeview and program guides. So the choice seems to be Freeview, ease of use and no external recording, or external recording but analogue tuner(s) with Videoplus.

It gets worse. Most of these low end HDD recorders have no support for topup TV. So you can only record the free to air Freeview channels.

The background to this is that I've got NTL TV as part of a package but also so I can watch the MotoGP and other motorcycle racing on Eurosport, Motors TV and Men and Motors. NTL have taken 2 years now to roll out their HDD recorder (like Sky+). The early adopters on Telewest have had big problems with theirs and NTL might be releasing it in the next 3 months. Or they might not. It's not yet on their product pages. You can kind of bet that the NTL version will be twin tuner, have an easy to use EPG but also won't be able to record from external sources. My VHS recorder has finally died. I *will* need to record Eurosport channels some time next year.

Aaaaaahhh! Why is every solution flawed?

Why is it that every single major purchase I make leaves me feel dis-satisfied and pissed off because the product is broken in some obvious way. Or at least in some way that seems obvious to my overactive critical mind?

Our aging Sony VHS VCR finally broke. And our equally aging non-widescreen Sony TV is embarrassing. So it was time to upgrade the major bit of evening entertainment hardware in the household. So I ventured forth into the minefield that is Black and Silver consumer electronics. As usual I didn't do enough research before picking what looked like a bargain. A nice new 32" Evesham Alqemi SX LCD TV and an Evesham PVR160 hard disk recorder. At UKP600 and UKP150 these look like pretty good value. There's just one catch, we have NTL cable, principally so I can watch motorcycle racing on Eurosport and Motors TV. So a key requirement is that it plays well with NTL cable and I can record a cable channel. So I make a point of asking the salesman, he (and I) look at the box and see that as well as Freeview, the PVR has two Scart inputs and should be able to record from one of them. What I should do is wait for NTL to finally release their HDD competitor for Sky+. But I've been waiting 24 months since the announcement and there's still no sign of it. And lots of complaints about their subsidiary, Telewest's, version. But with Christmas coming up, I can't be without any method of TV time shifting.

The boxes get home, it all goes together, it fires up first time, the manuals aren't too bad. Having a hard disk for recording from a 14 day program guide is super cool. And then the irritations start.

- The TV has a very slight but annoying lip sync problem. I do the research and discover that this is actually normal and caused by the differing digital processing paths between the audio signal and the video signal. You can get super high end home entertainment hardware with adjustable audio delay lines to tweak it out. The IBC held a seminar on "Lip Sync: A lost cause". So everybody, but everybody, is spending large amounts of money on Digital, High Definition, super shiny, giant, flat, wide, video hardware that upsets the part of the brain that focuses on the lips and mouth of people speaking to us, leading to a low grade anxiety while watching. After a while you can't quite work out what's wrong but you know something is.

- Some manufacturer in the far east has come up with an amazingly cheap electronics board that combines two Freeview tuners with a 3.5" hard disk. This gets packaged into lots of slightly different boxes with slightly different logos and sold at an amazingly cheap price. BUT, the designers left out one blatantly obvious feature that every recorder has had since the invention of the Scart plug and that's the ability to record from Line in as well as the internal tuner(s). Yup. The PVR doesn't work with an NTL Cable box. The second SCART socket is Video OUT ONLY for connection to a DVD/VHS recorder for archiving recordings. It should be so trivial to provide this that I can almost imagine that it would be a software upgrade only. And because the boards come from one manufacturer, every single low end HDD recorder is the same. So these things don't work for anyone with cable or satellite. Doh!

- The PVR box has room for a FreeView pay-TV card. But the slot is blanked off. So even if I paid (again) for topup TV to get Eurosport, I still couldn't record it.

- So the PVR goes back for a refund and I walk down to Richer Sounds, hoping for a sensible sales person and a bargain. Hooray, they have an LG DVD recorder and 160Gb HD for only UKP250. It appears to do everything I need. Fingers crossed. Back home it all goes together. Somewhere in the manual it says HDMI out, the TV has HDMI in. I nip down the shops and buy an HDMI cable. Then I look at the back of the box. Arrrggg! The RH188H has the socket. I've got the RH188 which doesn't. Oh, well, everything else seems to work. I don't get the nice 14 day EGP but Videoplus and manual timing works and I've been doing that for years with only a few fuckups.

- I'm still trying to find the optimum way of hooking all the SCARTs and antenna cables together. This should be simple but it's confused because we have an aerial on the roof, a tuner out from the NTL box and three bits of kit each with two SCARTs. The antenna feed for everything needs to come from the aerial to get Freeview on the TV. The SCART interconnect is about trying to avoid picking from 7 Digital inputs every time you switch from TV to Cable to Recorder. And making sure I don't screw up when setting the timer.

- The old Sony TV had speaker output sockets. We had an ancient pair of Celestion Ditton 15 speakers, inherited from my Dad, hooked up. They have a lovely warm sound with great bass. Of course the new TV has numerous audio out sockets but it's all low level. And while the built in speakers are ok, they're a bit weak. There's a bunch of frankly useless effects like an equaliser, bass boost, two speaker Dolby enhancement, mono to fake stereo. So they all get set to flat. The headphone output is independent of the speaker output. And the remote doesn't control it. Plugging in headphones doesn't mute the main speakers. In fact there is no way to mute the main speakers except the big mute switch which is overridden by the volume control. So do I a) take the back off and solder in a speaker out socket. or b) buy the cheapest stereo amp I can find or c) buy a cheap Dolby surround decoder. But wait a minute, the external amp connections will mean yet another remote to control the sound which is different from the two remotes for channel. And why am I even contemplating ripping a brand new box apart and wielding a soldering iron? Am I nuts?

- Somewhere in here I go looking for reviews or anyone who knows what they're talking about. And that's when I'm reminded that Google sucks when looking for anything to do with consumer products. All you get is 30 price comparison engines. And when you do actually find a forum, there's a spectrum of competence from extreme hardware and software hackers reverse engineering the electronics (1%) to vast hordes of amateurs who haven't a clue (99%). And all mingled in with extremely upset customers who've been sold a pup and have had to fight their way through customer support hell (15%).

I guess I must be getting old and turning into the classic grumpy old man. This stuff used to be really easy when there were 4 terrestrial channels, TVs were all the same and so were VHS recorders. Now it's a constant and expensive treadmill of amazing technology that grows in features and drops in price on a 6 month cycle. Except that it's always 10% broken and not exactly what you wanted.

This modern life, eh?

Boing Boing: AT&T's You Will ads - campaign for Internet normalcy :

the Internet was(is) way better at letting us be weird than it was(is) at helping us be normal.

Telekinesis

Why: I cannot imagine how a bio-chemical-electrical mechanism like the brain and nervous system can cheat Newton's laws and push dumb matter around at a distance. And I don't really believe that any amount of quasi-quantum theory can help make it happen.

Caution: If the brain has quantum effects built in, and if the many worlds interpretation of Quantum Physics is right, then it's just about possible that the brain might be able to choose to live in the universe where everyone's underwear spontaneously jumps 2 feet to the right. But that's a big if.

Corollary: There's a whole range of New Age claptrap that boils down to a belief in Telekinesis. Some parts of "The Law Of Attraction" amount to this.

Prove it: Follow this experiment for a week or two. Look for money on the ground as you walk the streets. Spend a week with the point of view that the money appears because looking for it is making it appear in front of you. Try to come up with several possible mechanisms for this. In the second week use the point of view that you're seeing money on the ground because you're paying more attention to what's around you. Develop several alternate hypotheses for why you're finding more money on the ground and try to test them out.

Seen on Slashdot | How To Tell If Your Cell Phone Is Bugged

I read through a full list of the ways in which the British State monitors me. When you read them all at once, it has quite an impact. The simple question I have is this: I am completely innocent. I have committed no crimes and am not suspected of committing any crimes.

SO WHY AM I BEING WATCHED?

Nobody is truly innocent. Anyone who rides a motorcycle understands this.

The key is "Getting away with it".

I'm getting there with my home build recumbent. When I first rode it, it was really twitchy and decidedly scary going down hill. I tried various attempts at changing trail, but today gave up on that and fitted a 24" front wheel instead of the 20". Much better. It feels more like a bike now and is just about ride-able hands off.

I've also moved the pedals further away which has helped drive especially up hills. I'm still occasionally bumping a knee on the handlebars. Not sure how to fix that.

The chain was 2 links too short. In top gear on the front chainring and bottom gear on the mech it was all too tight and prompting the chain to jump off the bottom guide.

I've now sourced an old Estate Agent sign (Coralite) that happened to be lying on the pavement across from our house. Next step is to fashion this into a tail fairing.

My No Weld Recumbent made the Makezine Blog.

Void.Bot was ProgrammableWeb's mashup of the day.

Ross Mayfield asks: Is she creating experiences, or just playing a spot market amidst DRM countermeasures?

We're all just playing the spot market between rival versions of the future.

[09:42:55] Julian Bond says: Just been pondering group forming. For a network of size N
- Metcalfe: Value grows by N^2
- Reed: Value grows by 2^N - N - 1
Some implications for Skype:-
- Group chats radically increase the value of the network because they move Skype from Metcalfe to Reed.
- What's the minimum average size for a group chat to be self-sustaining?
- What's the maximum average size for a group chat before it splits? There's some law that says groups become unwieldy at about 150 participants. So Skype public chats should be set to max 150 ?
[09:42:55] Julian Bond says: - Skype needs to actively encourage group forming. Which means things like public chat directories.
[09:43:49] Julian Bond says: Few-To-Few comms are more interesting than one-to-many or many-to-many
[09:44:37] Julian Bond says: "The long tail" is spiky. It's actually made up from large numbers of small communities.
[09:44:49] Julian Bond says: In any community, 90% lurk.
[09:45:37] Julian Bond says: The Fat Middle is more interesting than the Short Head or the Long Tail.
[09:45:38] Julian Bond says: Oooh. I can feel a book coming on.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jbond/tags/noweldrecumbent/

One Ladies MTB.
One kids 20" MTB. Fork and front wheel
One older kids 24" MTB cut out the bottom bracket and upright.
Skateboard wheels.
Assorted odds and ends and time.

TechCrunch UK » Blog Archive » Boo.com to relaunch

Oh Nooooooo. The horror, the horror!

Is the moment when Boom 2.0 jumps the shark?

I have a project taking shape in my head.

1) Take one late model iPod with a broken hard disk
2) Build a 1.8" socket to 2.5" hard disk connector cable
3) Build a 3.3V to 5V convertor to drive the 2.5" hard disk from the iPod's drive power supply.
4) Build it into a case just big enough to carry the larger disk
5) Double up on the battery. Perhaps convert to a couple of cellphone batteries.
6) Load Rockbox on it.

What I'm after is a usable iPod thing with a 120Gb disk that still fits in a pocket. Just. What I'm missing is the electronics knowledge to design 3) I can wield a soldering iron but I'm not sure where to start on the voltage convertor. I'm fairly sure that there are one chip designs for this that can handle the 0.5 to 4W current, but don't know where to start.

Because of the way that iPod cases fit together I figure I can keep the iPod face plate and mount it flush on one side of a plastic box big enough for the drive and extra batteries.

This is the next level of sites like Make and Instructables. Here's an idea, now how do I make it? Open Source Hardware Hacking?

Today on Flickr

You've run into one of the limits of a free account. Your free account will only display the most recent 200 photos you've uploaded. All of your photos beyond 200 will remain hidden from view until you either delete newer photos, or upgrade to a Pro account.

None of your photos have been deleted, and if you upgrade, they'll all come back unharmed.

Sigh. Is this what is going to happen to each property as Yahoo! hoovers up the more interesting Web 2.0 startups?