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Dave W had an entry yesterday about BT and needs.

We need some BT help on the publishing end. Blog software has got quite good at one click publishing of rich media files and then automatically adding them to the RSS/Atom feeds. We need to make BitTorrent publishing as easy and simple. There's work to be done here to integrate the sort of approach at http://www.blogtorrent.com/ into mainstream blog software. Critical, I think, is to:-

- Hide the complexity of creating the torrent
- Having the web end be a BT client and automatically seed so there's always a full seed available
- Having the client end stay online and guarantee 100% sharing from everyone who downloads.

Wordpress developers! Are you listening? How about Drupal?

BTW. Did we solve the problem of constructing a podcast feed that contains both plain and BT enclosures of the same file?




Skype Journal: Two phreaks experiment with Skype contact integration :

Skype is relatively immune from SPIM because a lot of Skype users have their privacy settings set to only receive chat and voice from people in their contact list.

I was asked to do a Skype API program to blast the same message to all of a person's contacts. It's quite easy to do and I did a proof of concept that takes a message from a form sends it and then closes each message window that pops up. you can then deal with the multiple popping windows as people reply at your leisure. But I didn't give it to the person who asked because I didn't want to be on the receiving end.

Apart from scouring the web for addresses, the other approach is to build an API prog that people want to use (like say put winamp listening to into your mood). And then report their contact's profiles up to a database. This is getting close to a viral technique for gathering profile data. It's not necessarily evil but it's pushing the boundaries.

Home Taping is Killing Music - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Yay! My image made it into Wikipedia as an example of a parodied version.




Enjoy. The next stage in the proof of concept is now done.


  1. Extract Profile information using Skype API, Delphi and the Skype4Com Activex

  2. Upload the data to a Mysql dbms by calling a php page


  3. Convert "City, Province, Country" to Lat/Long using The Worldkit Geocoder and some (ahem!) by hand with Google Maps.

  4. Display the Map and fill in the points with the Google Maps API. This calls a PHP script to get entries from the DBMS based on the lat.long rectangle of the current map.

  5. Any Questions? julian_bond at voidstar.com or skype:julian.bond?chat


Notice the small ads top right. They pay good money. Still chicken feed but better than AdSense.

But what have I done?

It looks to me like the benefit to the advertiser is taking advantage of my pagerank. Which means I'm distorting Google.

Have I become Evil?

I've currently got 534 contacts. Of these 257 have got good enough address detail to be able to get a single location in Google Maps. Skype is reporting that 233 of those contacts were last online this year. The intersection of the two is 67 people online this year and with address detail.

Now I've been collecting Skype contacts since the very early days so I may have a disproportionate number of old and dead entries. But a rule of thumb suggests that maybe 25% of someone's contact list can successfully be mapped.

Which then raises the question. Why don't people fill in their profiles on Skype? And when they do, why don't they fill them in accurately? There's 117 entries online this year but with blank country.




With the Skype API it's possible to grab profile information from all your contacts. You could then do something like post it on a google map such as this one. I can't decide if this is a really bad abuse of privacy or really neat.

I did a little more work on this last night and this morning. here's the pieces of the puzzle so far.

- From the API you can get everything on your contact's profiles except email address.
- I can use Google unofficially or some other geocoder service to convert the country+province+city into a lat/long
- I can store all these and then read them out onto a Google Map.
- If I can find the magic USP, and get lots of people to run a local Skype AddIn program, I can aggregate everybody's contact list together and effectively build a Skype white pages outside Skype.

The privacy downside to this is that any one person only needs to authorise one user of the add in to see their profile detail and the world would be able to see it via my aggregator.

As an aside I'm still looking for a truly global Geocoder that can take a fairly arbitrary address string and turn it into a Lat/Long. Google Maps is very good at this, but curiously you get different results on maps.google.com from maps.google.co.uk. A search for "ware, herts, uk" works in one but not the other. While "ware, hertfordshire, uk" works in both. Google doesn't like you scraping their html to get the results out and they don't offer a geocoder API service (yet). I found another one that uses the USA (CIA?) world city database http://worldkit.org/geocoder/rest/ but it's less resilient to bad or partial addresses. The problem is that even in countries that are fairly formalised end users get very confused about how to write an address. In the UK, there's quite a lot of large metropolita areas with no county. So for instance people desribe themselves as being in London, London, UK. The existing mapping services have a hard time with this. And don't get me started on all the map and geocoder services that are USA only. Like Yahoo!

WSJ: eBay looking for allies against Google :: AO : eBay should go into competition with AdSense. They've got a huge inventory of listings. They could charge people who post on eBay a premium to have their listing added to the Ad Inventory. They then sell Ads to publishers/Bloggers in the same way as the AdSense program and use Paypal to pay them.

Look at the virtuous circle here.
- Every Ad is also an Ad for eBay.
- eBay listers get wider exposure.
- publishers get real Ads instead of "Get iPods on eBay".
- Paypal gets another boost.
The trick is to solve the problem of getting the context right. Perhaps they should actually team up with Technorati and use tags[1] to solve the context problem.

[1] When is eBay going to transition from fixed categories to tags?








I've now got Ecademy marketplace listings feeding automatically into Google Base, Google Blogsearch, and now EdgeIO.

EdgeIO was all pretty easy to work with as we already use Tags extensively in Marketplace, generate RSS and ping the major Ping Servers. I just added a "Listing" tag to the RSS and added EdgeIO to the Extended Ping list. I've added a couple of tags for the location, but I've hit the usual problem of USA based services not handling UK addresses very well. What I should be able to do is the same as for Google and just use an arbitrary address string and let a geocoder service figure it out. The main problem is that we have a very good postcode scheme in the UK that is accurate to a few hundred metres, but it's different from USA Zip Codes.




The planned maintenance work for this evening has been re-scheduled. We will let you know nearer the time when we intend to complete the work.

There may be a short outage of 5 minutes or so around 6pm tonight. (Sat April 8th) [from: JB Ecademy]




Google Talkabout: Pictures, themes, and more!

Wow! Googletalk has got pictures. More Wow! You can theme the background of chats!

Come on guys WTF are you doing? How are you going to overhaul Skype like this? How about putting in some real missing function rather than screwing around. Chat Themes? Jeez!

Meanwhile MSN Live Messenger V.8 Beta is out. Doesn't look significantly different from V7.0. Hidden in there is one significant feature. You can now send a chat to someone who's offline. This is perhaps the biggest reason I like Skype so much.

Skypejournal is looking for the person with the most buddies in Skype. I know a couple with more than 1000. makes MSN's 150 limit look a bit sick.

Jyve have launched the Beta of Jyve Pro. This is a Skype add-in that lets you charge for your time on a Skype call. Very interesting possibilities here.

Interesting question on the Ecademy MacOSX forum.
Can anyone suggest an alternative to MSN Messenger for Video Conferencing. I have used ichat but it means everyone I know has to change to aol or be on .mac Note that Skype for Mac doesn't yet have video. Still. Maybe users of Macinteltoshs will need to run Parallel and have XP running in a window just so they can have the latest greatest IM system running.




To add to bOingbOing's ear cleaning saga, perhaps they'd like this image that I'm fairly sure I scanned from an old paper copy of their magazine.


Who Designed This Crap? The Great Ipod Scam | MobilityGuru

No comment needed. Except to say that the comments were entertaining.




I'm getting increasingly annoyed and frustrated by people who don't publish contact details. (Cue "angry old man" finger pointing!).

Specifically this is people who don't:-
- Fill in their Skype profile
- Use an Email signature
- Put contact information on their websites

So take 5 minutes now to go and improve this.

1) Upgrade your copy of Skype The latest release is Version: 2.0.0.97. Release date: March 16, 2006

2) Launch Skype and go to File, Edit My Profile. Fill it all in and upload a picture. Put in your Ecademy Profile as the web address. eg http://ecademy.com/account.php?id=999&xref=999 where 999 is your ecademy ID.

3) Set Skype to show your status online. Tools, Options, Privacy, "Allow my status to be shown on the web". Now Ecademy will show your (more or less) up to date status.

4) Do the same with any other Instant Message systems that you use.

5) Go into your email package and set a signature. Assuming you're using Outlook (Why? smile ); Tools, Options, Mail Format, Signature Picker, New, You want to have a maximum of 5 lines. Something like

first_name last_name
Business address, town, county, postcode
T:Business_Telephone M:Mobile_telephone
http://your_website.com or http://ecademy.com/account.php?id=999&xref=999
(Optionally) skype:your.skype.name?chat

6) Contact your web developer and make sure that your website has contact details that are easy to find and up to date.

7) I'd strongly recommend setting Ecademy to show more information on your profile rather than less. I know people are concerned about privacy, I just don't understand it. I'd recommend filling in and making visible your phone, mobile, email and street address.

Now people will actually be able to contact you when they need to. If they forget the address of your office before a meeting, they've just got to find one of your emails. If they can't find an email they can check on Skype. The same if they need to contact you by mobile phone. Ecademy users will be able to see if you're on line on Skype or don't want to be disturbed. [from: JB Ecademy]




Wired News: Reasons to Love Open-Source DRM talks about Sun's idea of an open source, interoperable DRM.

I must be missing something here.

Alice gives the encrypted text, keys and algorithm to Bob with the source to the algorithm implementation. Doesn't this make it even easier for Bob to give the plain text to Carol? And surely giving the algorithm to Bob makes it possible for Bob to write a program to give to David so that when Alice gives David the encrypted text and the keys, David can easily produce plain text directly rather than having to re-record (or whatever) the plain text output of the original algorithm.

As Ed Felter wrote, DRM inevitably converges on Spyware because the only way to make it work is to obfuscate the process. If you hand out the algorithm and program, you encourage the production of hacked works that simply bypass it.




Skype Journal: Skype 3.0 will be released on ... Friday 16th March 2007! : By pouring over the change logs for Skype for windows, I gathered these facts. First there was Skype release 0.9x (major revision 0), which went through 23 public versions, and the average number of days between releases was 15.0 days. Next was Skype release 1.x, which went through 25 public versions, and had an average of 18.4 days between releases. We're now at Skype release 2.0, which has so far gone through 7 public versions, with an average days between releases of 20.3 days. Clearly, Skype are slowing down!

Now compare this with releases from MSN, Yahoo!, AOL, Google. Or Firefox or most of the OSS packages. My guess is that the majors are now so wrapped up in bureaucracy, quality control and management sign off that they've effectively forgotten how to ship early and ship often. What they don't seem to realise is that it's the only way they're going to stop Skype.

This does assume though that there's a constant stream of new features that can be added that is never ending. There will come a time when Skype simply has nothing more to add. The whole IM+VoIP arena will finally mature and converge on a single set of functions that everyone supports equally. but we're a long way from that yet.

Remind me again how long it is since the Google LibJingle announcement. 6 months? Where are the 3rd party products that support it? When are they going to appear?

And now reflect on IE6. We get a maintenance patch to IE about every month. And yet the core functionality hasn't changed in 4 years. I've just been struggling with implementing min-width and max-width in IE which still doesn't support this CSS tag. So why doesn't Microsoft roll out incremental enhancements that add support for things like this or fix the 1 pixel off bug as they go along and fix security problems? They've got the mechanism which is reasonably seamless. They've trained users to run updates once a month. Why does it take a whole major release to sort out the small annoyances?








Woot!

DRM is Killing Music The T-Shirt.

As seen on Boing Boing.

It looks like they ship worldwide.

Source EPS artwork here and here.
Please steal this, rip it mix it, burn it and spread the word.

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