Official Google Base Blog: Buying on Google Base : For buyers, this feature will provide a convenient and secure way to purchase Google Base items by credit card. For sellers, this feature integrates transaction processing with Google Base item management.

Is this the beginning of Google's Paypal competitor and them muscling into eBay's space?

With Songbird and rumours of a P2P extension for Firefox, is the Mozilla XUL environment destined to become a preferred route for cross platform desktop development?

How about a P2P IM+Voice+Video chat client built on top of LibJingle and using XUL? At least one person seems to be going in that direction.

Yahoo! Developer Network - PHP Developer Center
A bunch of articles and scripts about using PHP with Web 2 APIs, mainly based on Yahoo!'s APIs [from: del.icio.us]

On O'Reilly Radar > Tim O'Reilly says

From a consumer point of view, Apple's DRM is far worse, ultimately, since strong DRM just makes people give up on the product, or route around it, while Apple's is just comfortable enough for most people that they go along with it. Hence the effectiveness, to my mind, of Jeff's image. Which was "The key to protecting rights and getting paid is as simple as the difference in how dogs and cats are handled at the veterinarian. When trying to control a dog, you tighten your hold. When trying to control a cat, you loosen your hold. DRM, properly executed, is a cat. "

Cory is unsurprisingly all over this. Here's my comment.

DRM, properly executed, is a NoCat. There is no cat. As technical and business aware leaders we've really got to stop promoting the idea that there's an acceptable level of DRM. There really isn't. By praising Apple's DRM, we're promoting the idea that it's ok to sell customers a high priced, low quality, DRM-riddled product that only works on one vendor's platform. Is that what the customers were crying out for? The end result is that there isn't or won't be a single open music player that isn't tied to either FairPlay (sic) or PlaysForSure (even more sic). Is that really a good thing?

Thinking further about this. There's a persistent meme in the blogs that there is something called "Acceptable DRM". I'm very strongly against this. My take is that DRM is never about preventing piracy and always about capturing and controlling market share while ensuring customer lock in. But I do wonder if there's a parallel here with the real reason for copyright. Just about everyone agrees that Copyright as a limited term monopoly for the creator is a good thing and should encourage creators by ensuring an ability to get a reasonable return for their efforts. This balances the immediate payback to the creator with the longer term payback for the commons. Even the most ardent copyfighters seem to agree with this. The problem is that copyright terms are out of control and there's a persistent belief among creators and their managers that they should have an indefinite monopoly on their creation. The parallel with DRM is to argue that DRM gives innovators (like Apple) the ability to innovate and maintain a limited monopoly on their innovation and so make a reasonable return on their investment. But the strength of DRM and it's indefinite nature again distorts the balance with the good of the commons as a whole and specifically the good of the customers. Enshrining this monopoly in law with things like the DMCA legitimises this im-balance. In theory market forces should resolve this into a balance between the DRM owner and society. In practice, DRM re-inforces the existing market shape rather than allowing market forces to change it.

Thus we have a self perpetuating cycle where Apple can create and maintain a monopoly on both legal downloads and the player to use them to the long term detriment of the customer. But all this is moot. Apple couldn't have done this without agreement with the entertainment cartel. They wouldn't have given permission without DRM. The DRM gives Apple a weapon to build and maintain market share. Other vendors are then locked out of the market. The whole exercise is protected by the DMCA.

So no matter how much I say that buying a high priced, low quality, DRM-riddled product that only works on one vendor's platform is just plain stupid, very large numbers of people will still go ahead and do it because it's the only game in town.

A comment on a post by Joho.

I had a long talk with Ross Mayfield (blog) about the intersection of Wikis and Tags. The Wiki people will tell you that they've already got tags because they've had wiki categories for some time. But perhaps inevitably they've take a Wiki approach to it. The goal is to get the community to converge on the one true tag set for a particular page. And the user interface (both for entering and tag navigation) is slightly awkward.

What I think is missing is the del.icio.us/Flickr UI that makes it completely trivial to enter a set of space or comma separated tags and to navigate the tags once they're in there. This suggests that it was actually the UI that was revolutionary about those sites as much as the data structures.

But there's also a deeper question here about the relationship between public pages (URIs), public shared tags and private tags. To see this problem expressed go and have a look at what Last.FM have done. Anyone can tag a Track, Album or Artist. There's then two ways of looking and searching. You can use all public tags or you can use just your own. The problem in a wiki (especially with anonymous posting) is handling the tension between the one true set of tags that the public have converged on for a page, the mess of tags applied by all editors and the set of tags you personally have applied.

Here's a whole bunch of ideas for Skype API add-ons. Most of them fall in the category of "I wish this existed". Some might end up being commercial. Most are just geek fun and geek reputation builders.

I've been trying to get php to play with the Skype COM control. The problem is that it needs PHP5 and the COM support for responding to events seems flaky. Maybe Python or Perl would be easier but 'm not good enough on those platforms. I've done the ground work to do some of this stuff in Delphi, but it's web support for linking to web applications is not as good.

Anyway do with it what you will. If you fancy a joint effort drop me a line at julian_bond at voidstar.com

Skype Desktop and Web Development
---------------------------------

- A Bot architecture that can be extended to provide utility functions to Skype group chat participants. This would either be running on a participants machine or would run on a dummy Skype account running on a dedicated machine. Invite the account into the chat to get the facilities.
- Group chat to Web archiving. Every message is echoed to a web page store.
- Group Chat to Blog posting. ?blog Text. Would post Text to a pre-specified group blog.
- Group Chat to del.icio.us posting. ?delicious URL Tags [Text] would post a bookmark for URL to del.icio.us
- Auto TinyURL to URLs mentioned in chat. Any URLs mentioned in the chat over a minimum length would be converted into a tinyurl
- Karma server. Any word of the form myWord++ or myWord-- would increment or decrement a karma store for that word. ?karma myWord would retrieve the current value
- Get top three results for searches in
- Google
- Amazon
- Technorati
- del.icio.us
eg ?google ecademy returns the top 3 results for ecademy
- Description server. A bunch of commands to define a text description of XXX eg ?def XXX is really stupid. ?XXX would return "XXX is really stupid"
- Heralding. When somebody joins a chat, grab a description from the description server or from their profile and sends "SkypeName is blah, blah, blah"

- Copy Jibot on IRC Here's Jibot's help.
Dictionary and user info: ?learn concept is definition || ?whois concept || ?whatis concept ||?forget concept is definition || ?forgetme
Technorati: ?info blog.com || ?last blog.com || ?cosmos blog.com || ?blogrep keywords
Amazon: ?amazon words || ?asin ASIN || ?isbn ISBN
Google: ?google words
Karma: nick++ || nick-- || ?karma nick || ?karma

- An app that let you control remote Apps such as a Shoutcast (internet radio) server. Send a chat message to the app and it would return status or make a status change of the attached app.

- An Add-on that paused and restarted *all* music players such as iTunes instead of just winamp on incoming and outgoing voice calls.

- An Add-on to get what you're currently listening to in all major music players and use it to update your mood.

- An Add-on to switch Skype to mono, single channel so that the voice call was more like a phone in one ear when wearing stereo headphones.

- A Firefox sidebar that replicated the Skype UI.

- An Add on that implemented the missing NetMeeting functionality piggybacked on Skype's comms. eg whiteboard, desktop sharing.

- A file sharing app that lets you browse shared directories on the target machine and then download a file or folder. Think Soulseek meets Skype encrypted file transfers.

- An app that can stitch together two or more group chats to get round the 50 participant limit.

- Automatic GPS and/or IP-Geo translation+Skype Presence to Google Map
See http://www.gatagata.jp/SKSweets/ja/map_ww.html

- Stalk. An App to watch a specific person and to then alert you when they came online.

- An App and web site to enable a professional to charge by the minute for time spent providing their service via Skype, Skype-In and Skype-Out

- A distributed call centre where call centre operators worked at home via Skype, Skype-in and Skype-out.

Joi Ito's Web: Invested in last.fm : However, last.fm is one of those exceptions and I wanted to let you know that I invested together with Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn and Stefan Glänzer, CEO of 20six Weblog Services AG in the UK in October.

Woot! Congratulations Last.FM! Hopefully some investment will let them buy a better quality of tea and finally remove the tailor's dummies from the big pile in the corner of the office. Oh and remove the last few annoyances from their web site. And rip a bit more of my CD collection so that the tunes I listen to actually become available in my profile radio.

Whatever, it couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of people.

And even though they'll benefit, I really hope Yahoo don't buy them. Which does kind of raise the question. What exit route are Joi, Reid and Stefan thinking about? Because VC always needs an exit route.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9590_22-6040983.html

There are a number of discussion board sites devoted to trying to run Apple Intel-Mac OSX-86 on non-Apple hardware. Apple has now used a DMCA Cease and Desist order to get the boards (but not the rest of the sites) closed down.

Apple clearly has the right to do this under US law. But it's pretty dumb isn't it? It was absolutely inevitable that people would attempt to hack OSX so that it would boot on a non-Apple Intel-86 machine. Trying to keep a lid on this by attacking hobbyist sites feels like a Canute operation. Now as others have said running OSX on non-apple with no support is never going to be a mainstream activity or terribly sensible beyond being able to say "look at what I did". It's hard for me to see where Apple loses providing there's just enough control to force people to buy Apple hardware if they want OSX.

This just looks like a source of bad press.

But it opens up a wider issue. Exactly what will Apple have to do to tie their software to their hardware? And what implications does it have for the rest of us when Intel help Microsoft to do the same thing. The argument gets thinner, but OSX depends to a very great extent on OSS and Linux. What happens when you can't run Linux on commodity Intel hardware because it's all got hardware ties to commercial operating systems? At which point I should add that it's very hard to run XP or Linux on macintels, but it has almost been done.

Oh, and "Just Say No To DRM". Even and perhaps especially if it's in the operating system.

"A Geek is someone who will spend 5 hours working out how to do a 6 hour job in one hour."

Remember the human genome project? When they started the project was going to take 10 years. This pushed inovation so that 9 years later, the project would have only taken 1 year. Did you ever spend half the project working out how to automate something that you could have done by hand if you'd just dived in and started?

Lessons from the Sony CD DRM Episode is finally out and it's a most excellent piece of scholarship from J. Alex Halderman and Edward W. Felten. Let's hope it has the desired effect.

I've just been reading Sifry's Alerts: State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 2: Beyond Search It occured to me that if Chris Andersen can create a speaking career out of "The Long Tail", somebody ought to be able to do the same out of "The Fat Middle"! There is a rich mine of discussion to be had about what it means and how to exploit it.

Just briefly, The Short Head is getting shorter and lower but the incumbents are usually unassailable in the medium term. And even though they've got all the concentration of money, getting your hands on it is hard work. The Long Tail is getting longer and longer while individual entries get less and less attention. If you can build systems that can handle the volume of entries and make money from the small sales per entry, there's gold out there. But it's damn hard to get at. And you need to be Amazon or eBay to exploit it. Where most of us work and where most of us end up when we're moderately successful is The Fat Middle. If you can pick a good niche and dominate it, there's relatively easy money to be made. It's also the area where the most churn happens, entries are boiling up out of the Long Tail, finding their place in the Fat Middle and then falling back again all the time.

So there you go. A quick search for "The Fat Middle" and thefatmiddle.com turned up almost nothing. You read it here first, if it gets traction, remember me!

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

Scobleizer Kim turns Microsoft toward open source? The Scobleizer says, somwhat tongue in cheek,

Kim Cameron, what are you doing (he just announced that he got Microsoft’s InfoCards working on WordPress and PHP and is having a conversation with lots of people in the community)? You trying to ruin Microsoft’s reputation? By listening to folks like Marc Canter?

I left this comment.

Here's a radical idea, specifically about InfoCards but applicable to anywhere MS is involved in trying to set standards. Take a leaf out of Google's book and LibJingle. Sponsor and fund a few open source programmers to produce open source libraries in all the major platforms that might implement InfoCards. Some people (Marc!) seem to think that it's not Microsoft's problem and *we* need to do the work. But actually Microsoft needs widespread implementation if InfoCards isn't going to be something that's used by Microsoft properties only. And what better way to get that widespread implementation than to seed the community with tools that they can use.

There's a tricky line here for MS to walk. Supporting other platforms may bite into your own platform sales. But lack of support of other platforms may limit the success of your global initiatives. Can you look past the first to see the benefits of the second?

I've recently had an email conversation on this subject with a Microsoft person. He raises the issue with directly funding implementations, in that there's a risk of it tainting the open-ness of the protocol if all the work appears to be from Microsoft. But isn't this to completely misunderstand the nature of open source work? Even if MS fund the work, if it's open source, it's open source. Others will build on it. More importantly others *can* build on it.

Lessig estimates that in the book world, there are approximately 18,000,000 books, 16% Public Domain
9% in Copyright and In Print, 75% in Copyright but Out Of Print. I wonder what the equivalent figures are for Music.

It seems to me that just as in books there is a large body of music that is in copyright but is unavailable to buy anywhere. This also seems like a golden opportunity for somebody like Amazon to have a print on demand service on CD and for a legal AllOfMp3 style site that sells only back catalogue, deletions and out of print music.

Kim Cameron's Identity Weblog » Julian Bond on Canter and InfoCard

I have good news. I’ve now been able to put together some mods for Wordpress that allow my site to accept infocards.

The mods were written in PHP, and Johannes Ernst - who I’ve been speaking with at the Berkman Identity Workshop - has asked me to publish the code on my blog. So I will. And I’ll explain how it works.

I realize InfoCards aren’t exactly ubiquitous right now, so you won’t be able to try it out immediately. But this weekend I’ll be posting a link to a video of the user experience.

This is tremendous news. Let me be the first to congratulate Kim. And I promise to put Mr Cynical back in the box.

I went along to *Mashup last night, Sam Sethi spoke about Microsoft's Live products (coming soon). As tends to happen at these things, my muttered "Oh Good Grief" was a bit too loud and I got asked to ask a question by the moderator. I said how ironic it was that we were at a presentation to talk about mashing 2 web application APIs together to create a 3rd when what we were being presented with was one Microsoft future product working with another Microsoft future product. I then questioned whether Infocards was actually open which was what had prompted the original "Good Grief". Marc Canter leapt in and did his aggressively optimistic thing and mentioned "Cynical Brits" (which I take as a compliment!) before throwing in a bit later a battle cry of "OPEN STANDARDS".

So anyway, Marc's blogged all this, and I added the following as a comment.

It’s so hard to have this conversation. I really, really hope that Infocards is open enough that it’s *possible* to write a LAMP based Identity Provider and Service provider that uses and interoperates with other Infocard systems. I don’t expect Microsoft to help with this, but I don’t really understand why they can’t. If Infocards were an open source standard, you’d see sample code and libraries being built by the community for multiple platforms. But because the source is a company, we apparently can’t expect them to also be the community or put effort into kickstarting the work. So the task falls on us. We end up having to do all the work with no help beyond reading the specs because we find it interesting. But I worry that the end result is that the LAMP community will not bother precisely because the spec came from Microsoft. The conclusion then is that Infocards is exactly the same as Passport. A reasonable identity system that only ever gets used inside Microsoft’s garden. The garden may have no walls but there’s still nobody else in it. What would be worse than this would be if Infocards has an open spec but the spec requires technology that only Microsoft has. Then it really doesn’t matter whether it’s open or not, it’s still impossible for anyone else to implement. For the record, I think that’s where it’s going. Like I said at the start I really, really hope I’m wrong.

I’ve thrown down a gauntlet in front of Kim Cameron. “Explain how InfoCard will get implemented on LAMP systems”. That doesn’t mean Kim has to do it, or that Microsoft has to do it. It’s only asking Microsoft how they think it will get done and by implication whether they’ll do anything to help. 9 months later, I’m still waiting for an answer.

The deeper question in here is how much any of these BigCos can open up and involve and support the development community when they are “in the business of taking care of themselves”. Google’s work with XMPP and Yahoo’s API groups are hopeful signs that people in those companies can see the self interest in supporting and listening to 3rd parties. Can Microsoft do the same thing? Or is the limit of their openness to use open standards? Although even that is a huge step which should be applauded.

Sam Sethi said some things that suggest that he does get it. And he’s a consultant working back in his old company not an employee. But I’m afraid the presentation seemed to be a classic MS presentation of futures, most of which were “Me Too” products, sprinkled overall with plenty of FUD. I’ve sat through too many of those not to be just a tiny bit cynical.

There's some things I want to see here:-
- A stable complete OpenID library for PHP.
- OpenID supported in Drupal

There's one question I don't understand:-
- Why doesn't one of the half a dozen other web bigCos with millions of customers produce an open Identity standard? Google, Yahoo!, AOL, eBay You've got a golden opportunity here.

And there's one thing I'll wish for:-
- One of the portal companies to turn the MyXXXX page inside out and create a TheirXXXX page. An AboutMe system that aggregates what I do for other people to read, instead of an Aggregator that collects together things for me to read about the outside world. So instead of trying to keep my eyeballs stuck to their property, use my content to bring new eyeballs in to their property.

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

Here's a puzzle for you. Why don't Amazon get into the digital download business. Surely they have the most to lose of anyone if we all stop buying DVDs and CDs?

There's a conversation to be had about brand, attention, long tail and what the hell is happening out there. I confess I don't fully understand it.

We know that the production of content is being democratised, spread and made cheaper every day. We jokingly talk about every person on the planet having a blog, podcast, music for sale, even video for download but each one only having an audience of about 2 people; themselves and their mum! At the same time the global brands retain most of their power and consolidation constantly reduces their numbers. We see the long tail graph of retail changing with the short head getting narrower and lower while the long tail gets taller and longer. Choice in retail is becoming overwhelming; for every product we thought we wanted there are now 5 competitors that are largely indistinguishable. It really is no longer necessary to go through the big media intermediaries just to get published. In business, SMEs are getting smaller and more numerous while the FTSE100 and Public Sector suck in more and more employees. Anyone can advertise now with a small budget, but you have to go through one place, Google.

This is producing a real fragmentation of our society. Remember when you could reasonably talk about "Middle England" and it actually meant something? Or when the whole country had watched last night's episode of Eastenders/Dr Who/Big Brother or the Forsythe Sage and you could reasonably expect to talk about it while making coffee in the office kitchen?

And yet in this maelstrom, we still cling to thinking that there are only a few winners who become famous (grabbing the attention of the majority) and if you don't manage that you've failed. And the media companies especially, still cling to a business model where one blockbuster pays for 100 "failures".

The problem then is how to get enough attention in your business and to set realistic goals. I well remember during the DotCom bubble when we all thought we were going to be "as big as eBay". This fed the VC bubble and the belief that you had to pour in money to fund a burn rate with the goal of becoming a household name. Now the barriers to entry have dropped so much that we have successful entrepreneurs (and ex-VCs) recommending bootstrapping, staying small, and getting out early. This in turn feeds more framentation.

Are the days of "Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes" now being replaced by "Everyone will be famous for 15 people"? And the business problem is then how do I find the 15 people who will give me attention and let me make a reasonable living? [from: JB Ecademy]

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]