See Twitter. It's really pretty horrible but the A-List bloggers are all over it. And it's got me thinking. ;)

There are two actions/questions that are very, very common on the net

- What are my friends doing? This is Few to One and typically relies on aggregating all your friends attention streams into one place. Typical of this are things like Skype Presence, Plazes, MySpace, Facebook, Last.FM, and now Twitter.

- Hey Look At This! Telling your friends about what you've found, what you've done or what you think. One To Few. Examples are Digg!, Twitter, Blogs, del.icio.us, Stumble, Skype, Flickr, Last.FM

There's some clear overlap here which results in Few to Few community. I find it interesting the way that most communities are set up with the COMMUNITY as an object around a topic and then people join them. Twitter has reversed this with it's friends and followers to create overlapping communities on the fly. But in the process they've lost the feeling of belonging and it's too damn hard to see where the boundaries are or to add to an existing conversation and maintain it over time. The best description I've come up with is that Twitter is 10,000 Alpha Geeks standing on soap boxes and howling into the wind. But there's no sense that anyone is listening!

The parallel with IRC is actually prompted by Skype. Skype public chats have re-invented IRC with some improvements but some downside mainly about scaling. Twitter feels as lightweight as IRC with the same message type of short bursts of text. But since there's no there, there, you can't maintain the conversation.

Writing web based systems to handle very large quantities of short bursts of text is very hard. Server based Shoutboxes and Chat systems typically don't work very well and don't scale very well. IRC was architected from the ground up to handle scaling. Skype handles scaling by using P2P and limiting the size of any one chat. Twitter is clearly having trouble scaling as it's wilting at the moment.

Somewhere in here is my continuing frustration with the state of Few To Few systems. I really, really like the idea of instant chat forums created on the fly from people defining their own groupings of friends and followers. I'm deeply disappointed that Twitter doesn't contain more to foster longer term conversations.

I'm bored with 2007. Isn't it 2008 yet?

I'm bored with this decade. Isn't it 2010[1] yet?

I'm bored with this Millenium. Isn't it 3000 yet?

[1]Can't wait for 2012 when the novelty curve goes vertical and the Timewave 0 Singularity.

Here's a challenge. How do you find the most popular (or any) UK Based blogs that cover technology, Web2, and startups?

I'm not really sure how to start.

Answers on a postcard to julian_bond at voidstar.com or skype:julian.bond

Totally awesome piece by Marc on thoughts brought on by showing an Indian round California.

Marc's Voice » Blog Archive » Incredible Cultural differences and the global divide

I have to be careful how I think and talk about this. So I'll just toss in two thoughts.

1) Travel broadens the mind. And sometimes in the process it broadens other people's as well.

2) Some times you have to work at seeing the good in both your culture and other people's. Being ironic and negative about both your culture and other people's is the easy option.

We had a hardware problem early this morning and again this afternoon around 4 to 5pm that meant that the Ecademy site was running very slowly. We're temporarily sorted this out and are currently investigating the cause to prevent it happening again.

Although this coincided with the new functions and changes going live, it was not actually related.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused. [from: JB Ecademy]

Why do we find it so hard to build an insanely great Few To Few communication system? Conversations within a group of like minded people is fundamental to what it means to be human. From the 3-25 people eating together to the couple of hundred people worldwide that share an interest in some obscure form of motorcycle to the local golf club, small groups of people getting together to socialize is very very common.

The geek world has tried all these:-
- Mailing lists
- IRC
- Usenet
- Skype Public chats
- Web Forums (phpBB etc)
- Tribes, Orkut Groups, Ecademy Clubs

And for various reasons, they've all failed, been discarded or at least haven't reached their potential. Often this is due to poisonous people (The Fuckwad problem) or it's because the technology is too hard (IRC) or too unstandardised (email client threading).

But then we get a whole series of technologies that are supposed to be better and are promoted as if they provide a real alternative. So we have:-
- Blogging - Actually a monologue, One to Few.
- Blog Comments - One to Few and impossible to track across the blogosphere.
- Twitter - Another monologue, One To Many. With almost no feedback and response.

So here's Danah Boyd talking about Twitter. I'm reading between the lines but Danah seems to be complaining that there's no back channel and Twitter is broadcast only. "The techno-geek users keep telling me that it’s a conversation. ... But i don’t think that either are typically conversations. More often, they are individuals standing on their soap boxes who enjoy people responding to them and may wander around to others soap boxes looking for interesting bits of data."

I've thought about and actually written the code to Tweet, whenever I get a new entry in the RSS feeds from last.fm (what am I listening to), my blog (what have I just said), Librarything (what have I started reading), Amazon Wishlist (What do I want), Flickr (What have I just posted). But I've decided not to enable it. Not because I want to be secret, but because I don't want to pollute the Twitter stream with hundreds of posts per day.

Meanwhile, we still need a better Few-To-Few conversation medium.

P2P File-Sharing Ruins Physical Piracy Business | TorrentFreak : If the likes of the MPAA, RIAA and IFPI are to be believed, file-sharing is causing worldwide havok, costing billions of dollars and creating unemployment. It's true that some people are feeling the P2P effect; they're called "physical pirates" and one of them says that file-sharing has ruined his business.

The story is about a Brit who made CDs and DVDs of music, games, movies and software and sold them for up to 10 quid at car boot sales. His (illegal) business has collapsed as he can't even give them away now. The combination of P2P file sharing and cheap DVD burners mean that there's no market for cheap ripoffs any more.

So let's get this straight. If you can't even sell cheap pirated copies what hope is there for selling the real thing?

I do have to take the story with a pinch of salt. I understand there is still a big market dominated by the Chinese in London for pirated disks. And I seem to remember seeing people selling bootleg tapes and CDs last time I was in Camden Market. Perhaps this is just a case of the future not being evenly distributed. Or maybe it's that you have to offer something unavailable elsewhere such as bootleg concert/mix performances.

A comment I posted a few days ago.

p2pnet.net - the original daily p2p and digital media news site : "They're just hoping somebody is going to figure all this out for them."

Something to understand here. The big labels are not involved in direct retail sales. In fact they have a huge channel conflict problem which prevents them from doing due to the risk of upsetting their existing customers which are the big retail outlets.

So the only way for anything to change is for somebody (like Apple, say) to come to them with a new business model. But when that happens, the lawyers, middle managers, and all sorts of other interests tie the negotiations up in endless powerpoint and chocolate biscuit meetings while they debate how the business model can't possibly work for them without this that and the other restriction, the most obvious of which is DRM.

So it's not really that the big labels aren't doing anything. It's because they can't do anything due to their history.

Which is what makes the death of AllOfMp3 all the more galling. Here was a positive new approach to selling music that is being killed by short sightedness as they've successfully cut off it's income. What the labels ought to do is to buy (or encourage someone to buy) the assets of AllOfMp3 and transplant it into the west.

The Open Rights Group : Blog Archive » links for 2007-02-13 : DRM systems are broken so quickly because they are grounded on some thing that is scientifically bankrupt, the idea that you can keep a secret from some one from whom you have told the secret.

I'm not sure I should suggest this to anyone but I can't be the first to see this. There is a way for DRM to work and to be effectively unbreakable. Use PKI. But it relies on the customer having a unique key pair. The provider encrypts the content using the customer's unique public key. The content is then decrypted with the customer's secret key. This could be encapsulated in the player software (iTunes say) and made pretty much transparent. On installation the player software would report it's newly generated public key back to the provider who would then use it when the provider created the file for download. In addition the encoded file could be signed by the provider and the signature checked against the Provider's public key.

This could all be open sourced and the algorithms published. Just as with SSL, the same scheme could be used by multiple providers and with player software from multiple sources.

The downside of course is that the provider has to uniquely encrypt each file for a specific customer.

There's a catch though. There's always a catch. Once the software has done it's job, and created the plain text version, this now sits on the customer's PC waiting to be captured and turned into a DRM-free version.

So what we've done is to prevent the customer from stealing a file meant for somebody else. Or distributing the encrypted file because it won't work for anyone else. But we've failed to stop the plain text version from being captured and distributed. And there lies the rub. it's not so much that you can't keep a secret from someone who you've told the secret as that you can't dictate what a customer does with the decrypted file once it's decrypted.

Slashdot | No Passport For Britons Refusing Mass Surveillance :

This sceptred isle
I used to be very proud of being English. I believed Britain to be a light in the darkness and a bastion of freedom. I believed that the U.K., along with the U.S., stood as examples to the rest of the world as to what was possible when freedom won out over fear. But today, I no longer feel that way. I see freedoms being given up for illusory safety, and an unprecedented level of control being given to a government that has never proven itself even remotely worthy or capable of such a responsibility. Mostly, I feel anger and sadness, and a sense of frustration that the proverbial shining city on the hill has become so horribly tarnished with the shit of misinformation, misdirection, fear-mongering, and mediocre talking-heads proclaiming that just a few more liberties need to go to make us all safe.

Me too. We were never as good as we thought we were, but we were never as pathetic as we are now.

Gizmodo's Anti-RIAA Manifesto - Gizmodo

Digital Rights^H^H^H^H Restrictions Management, or DRM, is the software that makes it so music you buy from the iTunes Music Store can't play on any other player other than the iPod, such as a Zune or Sansa. Right. DRM is not about paying the struggling artist. It's about filling the coffers of Apple and Microsoft (and Macrovision and the other DRM vendors)

Apple - QuickTime - Download - Standalone QuickTime Player
It's been really annoying me that you couldn't install or upgrade Quicktime without also installing iTunes. So it was good to finally discover the page for the standalone player. [from: del.icio.us]

Properly Chilled - Downtempo Music & Culture
What it says! So chilled, it's positively Arctic. [from: del.icio.us]

SKMap(ww)-Global Map
Puts your Skype presence on a Google Map [from: del.icio.us]

Thank you. I'm glad somebody can point out the holes in the email I received from my good friend, Tony the Blair.

NO2ID:Press Release Blair ID claims 'fact-free' : "The PM's claims on this subject are not exactly lies, so much as fact-free. Endlessly repeating a fabrication doesn't make it real, Mr Blair."

The Register adds: Collar the lot of us! Blair adds whole UK to police suspect list

I also look forward to taking part in the government's plan to make people travel to interview centres to provide a biometric for the national identity card.

Is the right time for a Godwin moment? Or should I invoke the ghosts of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Robert Anton Wilson? (fnord)

Gosh. No. 10 is replying to petitions. Are they actually listening?

bandrm - epetition response :

We received a petition asking:
"We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Ban the use of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies for digital content."
...
However, DRM does not only act as a policeman through technical protection measures, it also enables content companies to offer the consumer unprecedented choice in terms of how they consume content, and the corresponding price they wish to pay.

Bwaahahaha! So who exactly wrote that last bit? "DRM enables unprecedented consumer choice". Now where have I heard that before?

I've signed maybe 30 petitions now. Can I expect a personal email for every one?

This turned up today. It's exactly what I expected. And I hope others will rip into it unmercifully. Because it reads to me as "I'm right. You're wrong. And the critics are all lying".

---

E-petition: Response from the Prime Minister

The e-petition to "scrap the proposed introduction of ID cards" has now closed.
The petition stated that "The introduction of ID cards will not prevent terrorism
or crime, as is claimed. It will be yet another indirect tax on all law-abiding
citizens of the UK". This is a response from the Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

The petition calling for the Government to abandon plans for a National ID Scheme
attracted almost 28,000 signatures - one of the largest responses since this e-
petition service was set up. So I thought I would reply personally to those who
signed up, to explain why the Government believes National ID cards, and the
National Identity Register needed to make them effective, will help make Britain a
safer place.

The petition disputes the idea that ID cards will help reduce crime or terrorism.
While I certainly accept that ID cards will not prevent all terrorist outrages or
crime, I believe they will make an important contribution to making our borders
more secure, countering fraud, and tackling international crime and terrorism.
More importantly, this is also what our security services - who have the task of
protecting this country - believe.

So I would like to explain why I think it would be foolish to ignore the
opportunity to use biometrics such as fingerprints to secure our identities. I
would also like to discuss some of the claims about costs - particularly the way
the cost of an ID card is often inflated by including in estimates the cost of a
biometric passport which, it seems certain, all those who want to travel abroad
will soon need.

In contrast to these exaggerated figures, the real benefits for our country and
its citizens from ID cards and the National Identity Register, which will contain
less information on individuals than the data collected by the average store card,
should be delivered for a cost of around £3 a year over its ten-year life.

But first, it's important to set out why we need to do more to secure our
identities and how I believe ID cards will help. We live in a world in which
people, money and information are more mobile than ever before. Terrorists and
international criminal gangs increasingly exploit this to move undetected across
borders and to disappear within countries. Terrorists routinely use multiple
identities - up to 50 at a time. Indeed this is an essential part of the way they
operate and is specifically taught at Al-Qaeda training camps. One in four
criminals also uses a false identity. ID cards which contain biometric recognition
details and which are linked to a National Identity Register will make this much
more difficult.

Secure identities will also help us counter the fast-growing problem of identity
fraud. This already costs £1.7 billion annually. There is no doubt that building
yourself a new and false identity is all too easy at the moment. Forging an ID
card and matching biometric record will be much harder.

I also believe that the National Identity Register will help police bring those
guilty of serious crimes to justice. They will be able, for example, to compare
the fingerprints found at the scene of some 900,000 unsolved crimes against the
information held on the register. Another benefit from biometric technology will
be to improve the flow of information between countries on the identity of
offenders.

The National Identity Register will also help improve protection for the
vulnerable, enabling more effective and quicker checks on those seeking to work,
for example, with children. It should make it much more difficult, as has happened
tragically in the past, for people to slip through the net.

Proper identity management and ID cards also have an important role to play in
preventing illegal immigration and illegal working. The effectiveness on the new
biometric technology is, in fact, already being seen. In trials using this
technology on visa applications at just nine overseas posts, our officials have
already uncovered 1,400 people trying illegally to get back into the UK.

Nor is Britain alone in believing that biometrics offer a massive opportunity to
secure our identities. Firms across the world are already using fingerprint or
iris recognition for their staff. France, Italy and Spain are among other European
countries already planning to add biometrics to their ID cards. Over 50 countries
across the world are developing biometric passports, and all EU countries are
proposing to include fingerprint biometrics on their passports. The introduction
in 2006 of British e-passports incorporating facial image biometrics has meant
that British passport holders can continue to visit the United States without a
visa. What the National Identity Scheme does is take this opportunity to ensure
we maximise the benefits to the UK.

These then are the ways I believe ID cards can help cut crime and terrorism. I
recognise that these arguments will not convince those who oppose a National
Identity Scheme on civil liberty grounds. They will, I hope, be reassured by the
strict safeguards now in place on the data held on the register and the right for
each individual to check it. But I hope it might make those who believe ID cards
will be ineffective reconsider their opposition.

If national ID cards do help us counter crime and terrorism, it is, of course, the
law-abiding majority who will benefit and whose own liberties will be protected.
This helps explain why, according to the recent authoritative Social Attitudes
survey, the majority of people favour compulsory ID cards.

I am also convinced that there will also be other positive benefits. A national ID
card system, for example, will prevent the need, as now, to take a whole range of
documents to establish our identity. Over time, they will also help improve access
to services.

The petition also talks about cost. It is true that individuals will have to pay a
fee to meet the cost of their ID card in the same way, for example, as they now do
for their passports. But I simply don't recognise most claims of the cost of ID
cards. In many cases, these estimates deliberately exaggerate the cost of ID cards
by adding in the cost of biometric passports. This is both unfair and inaccurate.

As I have said, it is clear that if we want to travel abroad, we will soon have no
choice but to have a biometric passport. We estimate that the cost of biometric
passports will account for 70% of the cost of the combined passports/id cards. The
additional cost of the ID cards is expected to be less than £30 or £3 a year for
their 10-year lifespan. Our aim is to ensure we also make the most of the benefits
these biometric advances bring within our borders and in our everyday lives.

Yours sincerely,

Tony Blair


Useful Links

10 Downing Street home page
http://www.pm.gov.uk/

James Hall, the official in charge of delivering the ID card scheme, will be
answering questions on line on 5th March. You can put your question to him here
http://www.pm.gov.uk/output/Page10969.asp

To see his last web chat in November 2006, see:
http://www.pm.gov.uk/output/Page10364.asp

Identity and Passport Service
http://www.ips.gov.uk/

Home Office Identity Fraud Steering Committee
http://www.identity-theft.org.uk/

There's a certain irony in "Google Loses Cache-Copyright Lawsuit in Belgium" They thought it was ok to grab text out of news articles and display them on their news site. But if somebody takes their News RSS feed and then republishes it on another site they get upset.

This one caught my eye in Bruce Sterling's State of the World discussion.

"The Globalisation of Balkanisation"

We're all in the Balkans now.

It seems like AllOfMp3 is having it's life blood cut off. The only ways to pay now are JB and Diners card with Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, Xrost all gone. There have been sites that let you buy AllOfMp3 gift cards but I can't find any real ones any more.

So I guess that's it. With no way of taking money, they'll disappear. Unless of course they can sell the whole operation to Amazon.

I still think the AllOfMp3 model is the future of music distribution. They needed to find a real way of passing money back to the artists but the basic site, approach and price worked well.

So what now? Investigate their competitors or just switch back to the P2P networks?