Don't open the box and break the "warranty seal". It keeps the magic in. But the hacker imperative is that when you open the box, that's when the magic starts.

Mass Amateurization. It's not just the geeks any more taking things apart and recombining them. Really powerful things happen when the amateurs open the box.

Alpha Geeks are consumer 0. Now consumer one are doing things like swapping the hard drive on their cameras.

Why now.
- 20 years into the PC era.
- Given enough eyeballs, all features are obvious
- Advent of the lazyweb. Somebody, somwhere knows how to do it
- Gospel of openness is spreading.

So why Remix rather than hack?
- Remixing is inherently more conversational than hacking.

Examples
- Remix the web. View source.
- Firefox and Thunderbird
- Javascript. Google Suggest.
- Desktop integration. Google, MSN, Yahoo desktop search with browser as the interface
- Music Mashups and MP3 sample sharing. Customers and Biz weren't listening. But Apple was.
- Remix your TV. Tivo. leaves things open enough to do 30 sec skip through adverts.
- Remix your network. Wifi, Hotspots. Intel Brands Wifi. Apple do Airport express.
- Remix movies. BitTorrent. Video on demand. Netflix. Everyone teams with everyone else. Swarmcasting.
- Remix your data. Open APIs from Amazon. Small pieces lossely joined.
- Remix your text. I'm blogging this. Mass amateurism
- Remix syndication. RSS to desktop aggregators, to shared, to MyYahoo.
- Remix your bookshelf. Convert all text ever to digital. Project Gutenberg, Amazon search inside the book.
- Remix IT. Slew of specialists. Be liberal in what you accept, rigorous in what you put out. Hacks become frameworks. Raw material (opens ource code snippets), Nothing ever lost.
- Remix the browser. Firefox is an application environment.
- Remix Bricks and mortar. Anyone without an online presence will fade into the background.
- Remix Space Burt Rutan and Spaceship One.

Be unreasonable. And dis-satisfied. And fix it.

So here I am in San Diego at ETCon. Mirror world is how I remember it. Everything's backwards. The light switches, the taps, they way they drive. And why does this whole country smell of cinammon? Is that a puritan thing?

The flight was the usual painful experience. Way too much queueing and standing around. US airport Security is getting quite bizarre. Removing your shoes to go through the metal detector. And no bic lighters allowed.

And it begins. with Rael Dornfest.

Areatags.zip.

A simple textarea enhancement that adds a toolbar above the textarea that inserts html tags into the textarea text.

Works with IE6 and mozilla based browsers.

The optional patch to common.inc moves the toolbar to between the title and textarea.

Zip file at http://www.voidstar.com/downloads/folksonomy_1.zip.

Overview
This set consists of three items
- taxonomy.module.patch
A patch to taxonomy to stop it generating form elements for vocabularies that are from modules taxonomy or forum.

- folksonomy.module
A module to provide folksonomy support to contrib modules. Requires taxonomy

- folkterms.module
A module that demonstrates adding folksonomies to nodes using folksonomy.module.

Install
- Unzip this into the modules directory
- Enable folksonomy and folkterms
- In admin go to folksonomy and create a vocabulary
- Go to a node and start adding terms

Approach
- Uses taxonomy vocabulary and term tables to store all data.
- Creates term entries on the fly

Problems
- taxonomy wants to create form entries for all vocabularies but we want to do this ourselves. Hence the patch.

- Taxonomy deletes all term_node entries for a node when doing node update. So even if we create them, taxonomy will then delete them again. There's a nasty hack in the code to merge in the term tids into node->taxonomy before taxonomy does it's save and it then saves them for us. this relies on folksonomy beginning with F which becomes before T so that during hook_nodeapi, we'll always get called first.

- The's another nasty hack that I don't fully understand to get preview to show the terms in our folksonomy edit as well as those in the taxonomy edits.

- The term display on nodes uses term IDs for the URL eg ./taxonomy/term/12 But I'd rather use something like ./folksonomy/tags/p2p where tags is the name of the vocab and p2p is the name of the term.

- There's no easy way to get into the taxonomy pager display to add the sort of right hand margin that del.icio.us uses to show related and my terms. The only way I can think at the moment is to use a block that watches for the URLs we want to enhance. The other option is to create a taxonomy hook 'pre pager' that's just before taxonomy_render_nodes.

- The node display of taxo terms jumbles all the terms for all vocabs together with no indication of which vocab they came from. I'd like to see something like
forum:support category:documentation tags:module development hook

- If we want to cache count and related for each term, then we'll probably need additional tables.

Game Plan
I think this is the right long term approach. So the sequence is
1) Build proof of concept folksonomy.modules
2) Hack patches into taxonomy as we need them
3) Merge the finished folksonomy.module back into taxonomy

With the long term goal being that taxonomy supports vocabs with an alternative folksonomy style data entry UI

AdBrite - The Internet's Ad Marketplace
I need to investigate this. AdSense is not earning me enough money. [from: del.icio.us]

I'm Backing Blair because there's


So the government and Blair have managed to force through their terror bill. They pulled out all the stops but in the end they simply out manouvered the spineless opposition. Bear in mind here that there were moments when there were enough Labour MPs going against their party line that one of the votes was carried with a majority of just 14. But sadly Charles Kennedy didn't even bother to turn up that day along with 11 other Lib-Dem MPs.

I'm also Backing Blair because


Now we hear that pressure was applied by Downing St on Railtrack to remove speed restrictions and accept a higher degree of risk after the Hatfield disaster. Well that's certainly one way of trying to get the trains to run on time.

So make no mistake about it. This is the cult of Blair we're talking about here. Vote him out even if it means the Labour party goes too. Because this country is not well served by someone who's tough on blame and tough on the causes of blame.

Another great long tail article.

Bnoopy: The long tail of software. Millions of Markets of Dozens. : Whatever business your starting, think about how to serve millions of markets of dozens instead of dozens of markets of millions.

So how does this relate to marketing and selling to SMEs? SMEs are a classic long tail market.

Backing Blair Video II: Unbelievable

Another fine flash vid from Tim Ireland.

USATODAY.com - Music fans reach for the stars
Unusually good USA Today article about the current music scene and the effects of viral internet marketing and the long tail. [from: del.icio.us]

Amazon meets Google Suggest meets AJAX
Very cool hack [from: del.icio.us]

I'm Backing Blair because

He's tough on Blame. Tough on the causes of Blame.

I imagine a small meeting in the back of 10 Downing Street.

Blur: I know it's not going to work, you know it's not going to work, but make it look plausible. If we get this right, we can finally get one over the law lords.
Clarke (for it is he): yes, but...
Blur: Look. I know Blunkett was a lunatic but we can't back out now. Just do it, ok?

later that same day

Blur: Getting the MPs to vote on an amendment they hadn't seen and you hadn't written was a master stroke. Well done. 14 votes was a bit close, but we got away with it. Now if the lords throw it out we can do the same thing we did with the Fox hunting bill. A few more of these and we'll be rid of the Lords for ever.

Big Music loses to AllofMP3.com Moscow prosecutor throws out IFPI case that tried to close down AllOfMp3.

Hooray!

I've just been watching River Cottage with Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall and there was a fantastic backing track from Kruder and Dorfmeister, "Black Babies". Now it's Crufts and they've got some chillout electronica that I don't recognise. For the last couple of years BBC2 have been using chillout tracks from the likes of Bonobo, Blockhead, Cinematic Orchestra and a whole bunch of Bristol based trip hop. I think what's happening is that a lot of the programs are made in BBC Bristol and the guys and gals doing the sound are all chillout and lounge jazz freaks who hang out with the Bristol music scene.

The BBC are really good at providing lots of detail about the programs. They could do me (and probably others) a real service by providing the track listing as well. The same goes for the Extreme Sports channel. They have some fantastic skateboard videos late at night with some ace chilled rap. But unless you Tivo or tape the program there's no chance of catching the credits and working out what was being played.

The Doc Searls Weblog : Sunday, March 6, 2005

There's something wonderful about this. Get a Linux guy to review a windows product that only works with IE6. His first reaction after rebooting in Windows? Launch Firefox. Of course!

Anyway one bit in the article that caught my eye. "what Craig Burton calls EBWU: evil, bad, wrong and ugly". Yup, I'll go with the Bad, Wrong and Ugly. I'll just pass on the evil as I don't like that word and don't think it should be applied to technology.

The more I think about this, the more I think we should be going after Google because the toolbar is crap and runs in a crap environment. Let's tell them to go away and build a better one that runs in Firefox and in open source so we can hack it to bits and turn it into a tool for gaming page rank linking to last.fm

I was just checking out the UK Political blogs site that I run and noticed a Google Ad at the top.

Conservative Politics.
Huge selection of new and used. Check out the deals now.

Which links to eBay. Is the Tory party selling off old policies? I think we should be told.

It's 2005 and web fonts still don't work.

I happen to like reading 10pt Arial (sorry if you don't). But people tell me I should be using em sizes and % rather than absolute pts for "Accessibility", whatever that is. So what em size should I use so that the text appears as 10pt in most browsers using the default font sizes? As far as I can see it's 0.8em in IE6 and 1.0em in Firefox. If I use 1.0em in IE6 it looks horribly large (about 12pt) in text size medium and 10pt in Text size small.

So to hell with accessibility. I'm using absolute font sizes that look the same in IE6 and Firefox and if you can't read it then use Firefox and bump up the text size. These days "accessibility" does not mean "must code for IE6 functionality" since there is an alternative.

I've just spent an hour wrestling with CSS to try and achieve the holy grail of a Slashdot style layout in pure CSS again. The current trick is to have header, float left column, float right column, centre column, footer with clear both. This works and you're looking at it right now. But it would be good if the document sequence was actually header, centre, left column, right column, footer as the margins often contain links to external websites that can take some time to fill. The effect is that the margins appear before the centre.

So I had this cunning plan to wrap the middle vertically between the header and footer in a dummy div with relative positioning, and then to set the left and right column to absolute positioning. So I'd have header, middle, centre column, left column, right column, middle end, footer. By setting the middle to overflow:auto, it should contain the longest of left, centre and right columns and the footer should then float below this.

It works beautifully in Firefox. Needless to say it doesn't work in IE6 as overflow:auto in IE6 only works on absolute position blocks and starts throwing scrollbars. If a left or right column is longer than the center column, it overlaps the footer.

Arrghh! Why is CSS so hard? It's enough to make you go back to tables. I suppose there's always a chance that IE7 will fix all this, but I'm not putting any money on the table.

SAJAX - Simple Ajax Toolkit by ModernMethod - XMLHTTPRequest Toolkit for PHP
Now let's see if I can hack this into a Google Suggest style tag form element [from: del.icio.us]

Scent of a Robot
[from: del.icio.us]

Has anyone tried to deconstruct a gmail email to find the IP address or other indication of the originator? Yahoo seems to be fairly good about this as they include the originator's IP in the message ID. But I can't see anything in the gmail headers to help.

If you know how to do this, please get in touch.
julian_bond at voidstar.com