A Donkey on the Edge

Wow, I thought I'd be playing with RC5 for a while before getting the final release but no, the real thing is here. Go grab yourself a copy

With the long list of recent launch disappointments (with iPhone 3G by far the smelliest) I gotta say, Six Apart have not only delivered a hugely improved product (faster, more features) but a whole new license structure.

The new licenses are very much value co-creation engines. In a nutshell, let the mass of small businesses and bloggers use all the variations and toys for free, let them build on them, change them, and if they manage to scrape some revenue out of their enterprise, then ask them to buy services (primarily the excellent support) and pay for a commercial license.

I am very, very impressed and will be upgrading all my installations immediately. Great work 6A:-)

Yes, the A List Apart guys are running an improved version of the survey they did in 2007. It's good to feel one's industry is maturing, it somehow helps when trying to make plans for the future:-)

So why not take the survey yourself?

You know it doesn't get more cutting edge than this. First, after much stress and waiting, I jailbreak my iPhone and go in search of hot software. Great, open, free liberating productivity apps here I come and lo, I end up with the iFart, which pretty much does what it says on the can...

So yeah, post Jailbreak briccups (handset would cycle instead of turning off--made reseting impossible), have replaced iPhone and wait patiently for the 2.0 firmware to be delivered via proper channels and sync away with itunes and visit the app store and yes! I know have the iPhone light-saber app installed.

Surely our parents could never of conceived of such a wondrous world;-)

I've been trying to get Nick interested in personal branding after listening to @garyvee at Seed3. Gary made a bunch of interesting points and got me thinking about how Nick should develop on her work so far as a journalist. The woman has huge amounts of life experience and when fueled, can tell many an exotic tale of Argentinean vineyards, Tuscan raw-food cooking or tea tasting in the Indian Ocean...

Tim says

...and translate it into an action model for your personal bottom line--how your brand will generate personal wealth ( Me Inc. ) and how you will create social impact ( Me.org )...

Which really resonated... Does Nick settle on a business partner or employer who can work with her to create value using whatever existing methods they might have in place and picking and choosing from a small selection of Nicki's mojo as required?

Or does she choose to leverage her whole experience and develop on her own, working to distribute her mojo-assets socially to a large audience?

I can't help thinking that option one sounds like a bit of a waste...

Please immediately tell this person (details updated, thank you Peter)

Judge Louis L. Stanton
Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse
500 Pearl St., Room 2250
New York, NY10007

Phones
+1 212 805-0252

Faxes
+1 212 805-0389

that obtaining your personal history will in no way assist Viacom in identifying which of their intellectual properties has been illegally distributed. Please add that the phenomenal (how many millions of users?) negative impact on personal privacy utterly outweighs any spurious copyright swinery...

Read it: Judge orders YouTube to give all user histories to Viacom (Wired) and eff response and Viacom CSR

Man this is infuriating, and while I'm on the topic can I add that the making available argument is tantamount to arresting car owners because their ownership makes available the possibility of running over a pedestrian or saying that owning a gun is legally equivalent to shooting someone:-(

Time to increase my donations to the EFF, and you should too OK?

Wow, when was the last time you thought you'd get a response as a result of filling in a form on the web (never mind a rapid response)?

Well, I had a little grief from the fraud protection mob at Firstdirect this afternoon and as a result posted this note in the feedback form on the Eat website (and I won't go into the domain name resolution issue on the site which means if you load the flash movie by entering the domain without the 'www' the links to the feedback form are broken--I wonder how much more feedback they'd get if that was fixed...)

At 14:31:55 on 27 June 2008 (roughly an hour ago) I purchased a soup and sandwich from your 15 Basinghall Street shop.

When I returned to my desk to eat my lunch I received a call from my bank (first direct) informing me that there had been fraudulent behaviour on my switch card.

According to their records, the transaction I had just made in the City of London was routed through a supplier in Equador.

The security guys at the bank where I work reckon this is a man-in-the-middle attack and that someone has tampered with the keypad in the store (similar to attaching card readers to ATM tellers, to harvest card details).

Please review this situation asap.

All the best,
Dug Falby

To be honest, I really didn't think I'd get an answer (strangely, the Flash front-end is what gave me this impression: If it's not a real html form, how can it yield real results?) but I did.

A nice man called Martin (I think he said he was head of business communications?) rung up to explain what was going on as a result of my note. From his description, I pictured a black helicopter appearing over Basinghall street and special forces whisking the card-reader off to a controlled explosion. It was very impressive, he said he'd frozen all card transactions at the store, notified the card processing supplier who are going to come in and refit the store tonight and would double-check records for staff access to card processing stuff.

He also made a point of checking that I had notified my bank and assured me he would get back to with with any progress relevant to my situation. Prompt, courteous and thorough, just the way it oughta be.

Which of course means I'll be all the more likely to go buy delicious soups and salads from Eat:-)

9 minutes and 22 seconds to rebuild Donkey. That feels pretty slow and this is on 4.2 release-candidate 2. The same site on MT3.36 on the same box with the same DBserver rebuilds in 7 minutes 28 seconds.

My guess is that I should bin all the templates and rebuild from scratch. As it stands today, I migrated the 3.36 database that the site currently lives in over to 4.2rc2 lock stock and barrell without doing any pruning beforehand. Next experiment will be recreating the site from scratch.

So it's a good thing Maarten is running a training session on template optimisation today :-)

(I should add that the migration from 3.36 to 4.2 is completely painless and largely automatic. The issue on the table with 4.2 is what the Six Apart site describes as "raw performance" hence my test above)

So still no Seed notes eh? I'm struggling a bit because I filtered a lot out and on balance didn't really pick up anything practical that I wasn't doing already...

Jason made a comment about hospitals being broken in response to Peter's question "if you could fix anything what would it be? and earlier on in the day Carlos Segura had made a comment about only ultra-creative types using the collage medium.

This triggered a memory, check out this awesome collage by Anna Sandberg which was supporting MUF's proposal to CABE's Healthy Hospitals project.

The full MUF proposal is still online and is well worth a look :-)

Twitter / over capacity. Man is there a tech case-study to be written here...

Well, the panel is finishing up and we'll be heading out for wine soon. As per Serge's request, I'll try and get some notes up tomorrow.

Having just this second whinged about O2's charge for calling 0870 numbers, a comment has just come in on an old say no to 0870 post from March 2005.

Seemed like a great idea at the time but I guess the domain owner has shut the service down. I haven't got time to check it, but the whois register shows the administrative contact for saynoto0870.com is:

Customer Services,
RH DNS
rhdns@bigfoot.com
+447050643964

Chelle, why not drop em a line?

OK so it's now Stevenote - 7 and my iPhone is stuck in an imap loop and when I turn it off it reboots instantly. Of course plugging it in and clicking "restore" (which theoretically wipes your iPhone and restores it to OEM condition) doesn't fix the problem so I'm sort of hoping the 2.0 firmware will sort this...

...but I keep trying to decide if I should continue to put up with the phone. So many aspects of it drive me crazy. Take the battery for instance. On my N95, when Symbian thinks it's the best mobile OS on the planet but gets it wrong, the phone lets me take the battery out. This is kinda like the handset saying "sorry" like a grumpy two-year-old, a good thing. When it turns out iPhone needs to be disciplined, Steve just repeats "no, mine!" like another kind of two-year-old, a very bad thing indeed:-(

Well, on balance I think my iPhone sucks, but it sucks less than the other twenty smartphones I've lived with over the last couple of years.

It's not all handset woes, take for example O2's brilliant Apple-approved billing structure. Unlimited data (unless you instal a demon in which case the fair-use policy kicks in) and a set number of calls for a set monthly price. That is (almost) exactly what I want except that when I call my bank, or the power company, or I want book a movie ticket or call a helpline I have to pay extra for the 0870 local-call number. Never mind that I haven't got the choice. Powergen hasn't got a local extension I can call so the word from O2 is "tough" :-(

Not a big deal you might say but my £45/month all-in contract quickly becomes an £80/month which is way way more that I want to pay for the service.

I thought O2's iPhone contracts might have jogged the other operators into finding some sense so I checked my fave, Orange (France Telecom) to see what unlimited data contracts they had for new users.

Well, surprisingly, as of 2 June 2008 not a sausage

Sigh... crap really.

25

created by oneplusyou -- a free dating site

How many five-year-olds could you take in a fight 25 apparently, but only because my moral compass is faulty ;-)

Scoble wants us to link to this

He's got a point, this is potentially very worrying (and is also something I just wouldn't have guessed would happen):

This is a fight for the Web. We all just crawled inside a box that locks Google out.
Don’t believe me?
Go to Google and do a search for “Le Web 08.�
Do you see a Facebook entry there? Nope. Google is locked out of the Web.
This has created HUGE value for Microsoft and has handed Steve Ballmer an Internet strategy which brings Microsoft from last place to first in less than a week.
Boom!

Scary stuff indeed...

Just saw this on LinuxKungFu. I love "how the analyst designed it" nothing like solving the wrong problems by not looking at the bigger picture. Fantastic:-)

Hey, Jed's on TV :-)

A little confused by the implementations of permissions in MT41 -- Are these 'permission tokens', fragments of data that exist independently of the user-object? I mean I get it that:

user + blog + role = permission

but how does this interface (or datastructure?) express nested permissions? Or in other words, shouldn't the "moderator" role for user = James be superceded by his "administrator" role?

New stuff from 6A is usually rock solid so I'm guessing there's a valid reason for the above...

recently, on my tweet feed:

If you need to reach me today, d me

Wow, you know, I don't normally read Bob Lutz's stuff over at the GM FastLane Blog which is odd because I quote the blog to clients all the time. Just took a peek today and saw this:

... In the end, it cost us much more than that; it cost us our reputation for technology leadership and innovation.

We made that mistake once. We won’t make it again. I think the whole company has learned when you step out and do bold things, you win and when you're cautious and let other people do the bold things, you lose.

Many great ideas die every day because we value the safety of the tried-and-true over the risk that true innovation requires. This is not going to be the case with Volt; we are going for the brass ring.

Great stuff, a senior VP publicly admitting he fucked up (and promising not to trip over the same log twice).

So this volt thing seems pretty cool. It's a different strategy than the Tesla plan. The board at Tesla Motors are banking on a high-performance car (the 2008 Tesla Roadster) to get the ev ball rolling and they plan to roll out an inexpensive family saloon after that.

Also, the Volt is an E-REV so still factoring in the petrol pump...

The DVD format is a fiasco born out of a desire to control the way customers consume the products they buy.

I can't imagine any parent out there who would be happy to fork out fifteen quid for a DVD full of extra features they will never have the free time to watch knowing that after a couple of weeks worth of little fingers it will become a worthless piece of unplayable plastic.

The value is the experience of your child watching the movie NOT the stone-age tech used to play it (and don't get me started on a format that lets the media owner disable the customer's menu features).

The smarter we consumers become (and the more we share our experiences), the more the techpants will struggle with their pointless offerings and hopefully, new value-creation networks will take over:-)

So anyway, I was just going to write about wi-fi before going off on one...

I just got a couple of tweets from a guy who was trying to get on the net from the brand-new Heathrow terminal 5. Unbeleivably, he was being asked to jump through hoops, fill in forms, and worst of all, pay! Now let me make this completely clear:

Charging for wi-fi is like charging for tap-water in a restaurant.

Hell, it's like charging for air conditioning, or light, or cleanliness... These are all infrastructure items that are factored into the cost of the main event.

So look, you pay for your airline ticket, you pay for your state and city taxes, you pay your airport taxes, you pay for your extra luggage, you paid for the cab to the airport. You paid a king's ransome for the latte the kid at the next table keeps threatening to spill on your keyboard so YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE TO PAY FOR CONNECTIVITY!

Ok?!?

And just so we're completely clear on this one, not only should you not have to pay with currency or credit, you shouldn't have to pay with attention or privacy. No landing pages, portals or branded content, just unfettered, universal access for all.

The worst part is we're all buying into this nonsense, the average Londoner can see five wi-fi networks from his sitting room. In a five-flat Victorian conversion counting neighbours on both sides that's 15 broadband contracts. If you just got together with your neighbours you could share a low-contention business connection for a fraction of the cost (think about it, you're collectively forking out £300 a month for a highly contended connection with no service contract or decent support while £50 split between you would secure a bandwidth-assured connection contract).

So if you don't mind, cancel your broadband and talk to your neighbours and in the meantime, disable your password and open up your wireless connection :-)

You know, the last couple of years I've bought conference passes and then failed to escape work long enough to attend which is daft really... so I'm going to fowd this year ok?

Anyways, I signed up on the carson website and was reading the about the speakers (looking forward to hearing Steve Pearce) when I stumbled on a link to Headscape the online home of conference chair Paul Boag.

Now, Nicky always has to explain jokes to me and I'm never sure if people are serious or not and this gets worse as I get older... So I'm gonna take a punt: I think headscape could do better. A lot better.

Hey, we've just had a long and very informative post from Matt, a Luton-based Openreach engineer. I hope this really is an engineer speaking and not some perverse item from a 'guerilla marketing' agency subverting from within. He describes some real horror stories, if you're interested in the BT thing it's well worth a read:

I was on a fault last week and the customer drop-wire from the pole to the house was rubbing through trees so I replaced it only to get a phone call the next day from my manager asking why I hadn't charged the customer as the trees were on his property--this is the level that they are stooping to.

Do they care? This thing has been simmering for a while now, I wonder at what point a BT pr person is going to chime in?

Is BT still shit? (A Donkey on the Edge)

Wow, John Hardy and David Coates aren't just medical doctors, they're voice-over artists:-)

John offered me this fantastic arthroscopy footage after my operation. The arthroscope is hooked up to a video encoder which captures live footage for post-operative review. When I first received the disk it was just raw footage. After hearing about the number of arthroscopies on YouTube, John (who is not only a world-leading Orthopaedic surgeon but a painter, internet guru, web marketer and now film editor and voice-over artist) decided to have a go at an edited version.

The result is a complete transformation, a view of the whole op from me on very powerful drugs to the final phases of the joint smoothing, the whole thing narrated by the two doctors.

Oh, and before I forget, John was mortified by my earlier "before and after" pictures. He wanted me to point out that the surgery is very non-invasive and the recovery is usually very speedy. The following shot of my knee was taken roughly two weeks after the operation, the stitches are out and you can barely see the entry wounds:

Get ready for a crackdown on broadband use

Man, this pisses me off. The only person who gets to decide the value of a good or service I invite into my space is me.

Right now, my ISP isn't providing me with value, not even close as my connection rarely gets over 64k (yes, k not m) and the damn connection won't come up after a router power cycle or other network crash.

If the service was a little closer to what was advertised I could start building my own value with it. Because I work in the internet industry, there's a really good chance my connection to the cloud allows me to create stacks of unique value. You know, just doing a quick mental calculation I'd be happy to pay my ISP say £40, £50, maybe even £75 a month.

Of course given past performance, I'd say the chances of my ISP being interested in understanding how I create value are pretty much next to nil.

When are businesses gonna get on the damn bus?

Well well well, a new kind of phishing has landed in my inbox. Just when I thought the relatives and colleagues of intestate central african millionaires could show no further bounty, I am now being showered with cash by those friendly folk at the IRS ;-)

Internal Revenue Service (IRS)
United States Department of the Treasury
After the last annual calculations of your fiscal activity we have determined that you are eligible to receive a tax refund of $184.80.
Please submit the tax refund request and allow us 6-9 days in order to process it.

A pretty lo-fi attempt with no decent url spoofing or fancy html, not even a serious-looking IRS logo. Still, as a new take on an old trick it may hook a few incredulous pennies...

Governments (well, the current UK government) don't get it. The public doesn't seem to get it, but large budgets and serious, long-lasting political decisions continue to be lobbied for and won on a partial understanding of tech issues... arstechnica has a nice post on the "Hillary hacked NH?" story

MWSF 2008 keynote bingo

It's Stevenote - 5.

I'm now pining for an iPhone hardware update: a better camera, a hardware camera button, 32Gig storage, etched or rubberized grips, no disgusting pimp-my-handset chrome surround. OK?

So when I first started being interested in markup, I used to spend a lot of time trying to get non Western characters to work in web pages and imagining all sorts of crazy systems to support the transparent publishing across many weird and wonderful languages with their equally unique fonts.

Then unicode support became routine and I guess I stopped being so amazed when it worked;-) So the state of play is both wonderful and a little crap: I can now be spammed in Kanji, Cyrillic or even English if the lottery folk think that's what I'm most likely to read...

Well, I've been following Scoble's tweets today and it would appear his Facebook account was shut down (disabled). facereviews makes the point that this is a good thing in the sense that we do want FB to monitor it's pages for scraping.

One of the many posters in this hale of twittiblogging (I think it was Ian Betteridge but I've lost the link) gives the following example: just because you post your email on your blog doesn't mean you'd allow others using it or adding it to their address book or doing something commercial with it (I'm paraphrasing from memory).

I have to say I disagree with this, if information is to be shared publicly then all uses of the public domain should be equally allowed or restricted. If I post my email on my blog (or indeed my phone number) it is primarily intended for those that have a genuine need for it. Nonetheless I also accept that I will have to shoulder the burden of added spam, lack of privacy, identity theft or whatever else might come of its existing in the public domain. In other words, I accept both good and evil uses of my publicly posted data.

In Scoble's example, while he is legitimately trying to recover his social data, as a side effect of this scrapping he will also grab data from those he has shared with. This data is in the public domain and its posting forms the expectation of a social contract. That is, those that post information to Facebook (myself included) are building a sort of social creative commons and we need to accept that sharing this data effectively means placing it in the public domain.

Like most things, this contract only works if the benefits of having the data flow both in and out of the social utility.

Really?

Wow, this is kinda odd. I mean it's November 2007 and this article is writen as if this is news.

Online shoppers are not taken in by online advertising, and are turning to customer reviews, forums and blogs to help shape their decisions.

Equally, no mention of the pros and cons of review aggregation and reselling nor any mention of the likes of reevoo -- Still, nice to have the percentages (66% does seem low but hey...)

Online shoppers reject advertising - vnunet.com

Paul Downey

This poster by Paul Downey just totally made my morning: The Web is Agreement and how did I miss the Osmosoft thing?

So missrogue says, for those of you doing work on Government 2.0 (services side and politics side), she has started a ma.gnolia group: government 2.0 on ma.gnolia

I wrote a little brain-dump on decommodification this morning and have just now come across tom at interesting (different tom) a video from Russell Davies Interesting 2007 conference.

Tom talks about pipes (or tubes) and starts off his presentation with the example of the tobacco infrastructure, the incredible world of resources and infrastructure required for you to smoke a cigarette...

Which kinda ties-in with the aforementioned telecoms operator's pipes and their relationship to value co-creation...

No conclusions as of yet, but the video is nice, so go watch it:-)

What's that Dug? A new-year's prediction in September? Shurly shome mistake... Well, this one just popped into my brain so I thought I'd put it down on paper. I think 2008 will be the year of decommodification. The word exists already and has a few definitions. I'd like to propose a new one.

Decommodification The process by which value is re-infused into what those in the know in the telecoms industry call "pipes" as in "Vodafone is just a leaser of pipes".

The executives you'll hear using this phrase will be using it in the context of trying to find ways for the business to add value. If pipes are 'just' a commodity and the money is in what travels through those pipes then the telecoms operation needs to invest in building tools and services it can sell (like webmail applications or photo-sharing apps).

I think 2008 will see telco operators realise that the kids are creating the apps they need themselves, but what Ben Trott, Chris Messina, Katerina Fake, Rasmus Lerdorf or even today's darling Mark Zuckerberg can't do is provide ubiquitous, pervasive, reliable, cheap and universal connectivity to planet earth.

I know it's a lot less glamourous than making groovy stuff but there is one seriously big place in heaven for the operator who becomes the world's Good Connectivity Partner.

Well, that's what I was thinking anyway...

Well, I cancelled my Quechup account two weeks ago. The interesting bit was that my gmail address book was spammed two days later. Now that is fucked up...

Anyways, I just wanted to mention that I've noticed that a bunch of services (Qloud, J!NX, thetrainline, Wordie to name a few) are sending account confirmation letters with cleartext passwords and I'm wondering if this is a growing trend?

Now I realise non ssh passwords are sort of pointless anyways (an .htaccess file is but a curtain or a screen I'm told) but still, this type of email gives sniffers access to a validated email address, your name, your alias and a chosen password. That has to be bad.

If you're gonna send email confirmations, generate a random password and get me to change it on first login ok?

If Nokia were running the US Federal Emergency Management Agency, New Orleans would be 20 feet above sea level by now.

I've not read Michael Mace before but with a quote like that he's being added to my feedreader:-)

Mobile Opportunity: The war between Nokia and Apple (thanks phil)

Robert, this is really interesting stuff, shut up and let the guy answer the question:-)

Enterprises: follow the blog conversation about you | ScobleShow: Videoblog about geeks, technology, and developers

You know, I was gonna comment on the Skype blog Heartbeat (no, not on the bit where if they had decided to use computers equipped with a proper operating system their crash and subsequent total meltdown wouldn't have happened in the first place) (and no, not on the bit where for the same reason they can't manage a reliable single-customer view grrrr) no, I was going to comment on the email I received earlier today:

As a goodwill gesture to all you faithful Skype Pro, Skype Unlimited, SkypeIn or Skype Voicemail customers, we're adding an additional seven days to your current subscription, free of charge. And even if you didn't miss out on using Skype last week - you can still have a week free on Skype, on the house!

So my first reaction is that

1. customers that aren't those listed above can just fuck off
2. a customer worth building a relationship with is one that commits to a financial transaction with your brand. Gosh, how 80/20 nineteen-eighty-seven of you...

But then I thought to myself, you just nicked the nine quid I had in my account three weeks ago. True, you did explain that you had to, and you did make it theoretically easy for me to protect my dosh while giving me ample and repeated fair warning.

But you know what, if you clean out the balance in your customer's accounts that's all they're gonna see.

Come on, this is sooooo not a modern approach to marketing. Your empty gesture has left me with exactly the same balance I had just before your meltdown--zero.

Niklas Zennström, you're a smart guy, my guess is you can do a lot better (and you can start by giving me my money back)

This has gotta be my quote for the day:-)

Last year, Facebook turned down a $1bn offer from Yahoo.

Thanks Tom

After DVD John's first iPhone hack the elusive SIM unlock comes one step closer:-) Neowin.net - Hackers saw through iPhone AT&T shackles

One of the things I'm enjoying about facebook is the complete lack of rounded corners in the interface:-)

Wey hey, a sim unlock for iPhone is on it's way... DVD John has already made an activation server so network-free landscape iPods might be just around the corner...

It'll be interesting to see how mobile operators react to this. As consumers try and create increased value with the iPhone by making it work the way they want it to the trad operators could feel a little threatened. Most of them are still focusing their business on 'offers' rather than building value creation networks with their customers.

I'm still waiting for the operator that lets me build my own billing plan. Any takers?

You know, I just twittered this, but I get the odd S60 developer reading my nonsense here so I thought I'd put the question on the blog.

My current S60 wish list:

• I want to run software on my N95 so when I plug it into my mac with the usb cable, it emulates my iPod and causes iTunes to sync a number of playlists onto my phone memory. How cool would that be?
• and while I'm begging, has anyone thought about turning the N95 into a portable wi-fi to 3G bridge? Imagine the scenario, you all get to the meeting and no one can work out the wep password or find the right cable and it's all going tits up (I'm always amazed at how difficult large corporations make it to get on the internet). You whip out your N95, turn on wi-fi and the base station triggers a 3G data connection. All your co-workers go into their wi-fi menus and connect to "dug's phone" and voilà, we're all online!

I don't know enough about radio transceivers to know if that second one is possible. It could be that the wi-fi card in the N95 can't be configured to be a base station. Still, it does two-way traffic so you could see how that oughta work...

...and here's a link to something interesting NRC - Mobile Web Server

Mike Butcher points out that new European legislation will make astroturfing illegal.

Which of course is a good thing, but how are they going to enforce this? The higher end PR firms are creating great thinking about their clients by actually participating in the debate or even initiating it themselves.

I guess the Barry Scott test is going to become this law's Turing test;-)

Good to see Serge the Concierge doing his bit to promote the Alex James talk on Thursday.

Remember, get those cheese names to Billy before midnight tomorrow to grab your tickets:-)

You know, Billy and I have been really struggling to keep The Lecture List afloat for some time now, and we're doing it because we believe in it (the problem of course is it's impossible to get funding for a thing with no revenue stream...)

Anyway, people keep signing up and we know a bunch of people use it which is of course great. I mention this because every now and then (like when Billy got very drunk and bought Madona's tights) something fun happens that gives us a wee boost.

One such boost came our way just now when we were shopping for stuff for Clementine's birthday treasure hunt in Ceret and Billy checked his mail in the local internet café. To cut a long ramble short, Alex James told Ohna, Billy's wife that we could have some tickets to a thing he's doing next week and we just got confirmation from the publisher that it was OK to offer the tickets as a competition on the Lecture List.

So there you go, if you want some tickets, get yourself over to the Lecture List and answer the question:-)

Alex James | a bit of a blur is at Blackwells next week. The competition for free tickets is on the home page

So David has decided to get stuff done on Tuesdays. He's christened them Doesdays and you can join his Facebook group, check out the blog or just keep an eye on him over at Twitter

I'm feeling more productive already...

I closed my Zopa account yesterday and requested the paypal funds I had invested be returned to my Paypal account. The folk on the phone were helpful and courteous but I can't help feeling a bit amazed by the experience (Zopa is supposed to be a great site, so perhaps my expectations were inflated).

I'm reluctant to pointlessly hurl vitriol at the company because on balance, while the experience ultimately sucked, there were some very good bits as well as bad to the service.

The good news:

• Brilliant idea, cuts out the middle-men
• UK-based telephone support
• Friendly staff
• Beautiful design
• Secure (https) email system

The bad:

• The risk-to-interest rate ratio
• An email support loop that didn't resolve my difficulty
• The interface experience

It's this last problem that pushed this Zopa customer over the edge. It's interesting to see how superficially minor problems in the user interface can have such a large impact.

The interface really is very beautiful, but it degrades quickly once you start clicking around. To be fair, I wasn't able to explore the whole service, and in particular I never got to the 'magic moment' of actually lending or borrowing funds (I did try). But the journey I did manage was a rough one. The problems seem to arise from the site's scripts.

Two items caused me to fail my tasks. The first is a javascript validator that prevented me from successfully choosing and saving my security details (this should be really easy to fix) and the second is a series of redirects and cookie-setting choices that mean I didn't get feedback as to where I was in the lending process (I got as far as getting cash to lend into the system but never managed to set up a loan).

The Javascript thing makes an interesting example of how things can go wrong.

Here's what happened (if you can't read the text, click on the images for a larger version):

Step one--I tried to complete the logon form like this:

Which returned this screen:

Now I always assume I've done something wrong when a form comes back like this so I also tried this:

and this:

and this:

and even, after taking a long look at the "dd/MM/yyyy" prompt:

All of these returned the message:

Oops, please check that the memorable date is correctly formatted and between the years 1753 and 9999

(I did finally get in by typing the numerical equivalent of asdfasdf which of course meant I couldn't retype the date when later prompted for it)

Some possible solutions?

Option one, the bare minimum. Change the text of the error message so that it contains an imperative. It should read "do this and achieve that" not "this might be wrong".

Option two, if the date range is so important (remember the original error that specified a range from 1753 to 9999) then don't allow the user to input an out of range date. Give them a select statement which only contains valid years.

Option three, make the error message specific to what is wrong and suggest a correct alternative. Offer links to fix the problem.

Finally, as I was about to hang up from my last call with the nice folk in customer support, I was told that the system didn't work in Firefox and that I needed to use Internet Explorer. Yes, she actually, really, did said that...

It’s all just people lobbing rocks into a bottomless pit. Maybe that is a kind of community. But, given the lack of social interaction that’s going on I wonder how important some of this is...

people lobbing rocks into a bottomless pit can I say that has to be the most pertinent and beautifully expressed assessement of YouTube I've read to date.

I used to wonder if the criptic items people were hurling at each other over the PS3 launch films I posted constituted a conversation but I guess I would have to say not;-)

So I managed to read through Adam Buxton's website for ages before I realised it was Adam as in Adam and Joe Adam ohhhhh righhhhht...

Thanks DutchAsHell

Well, I'm glad I'm not the only consultant out there to get into trouble with Tagged.com. The more I look, the more I find people sharing similar experiences

So here's a public service anouncement.

If you're pissed off at receiving the damn emails, why not threaten, or at least hurl abuse at, the VCs behind tagged.com? Here are some bits to get you started:

enjoy :-)

I thought I'd mention for those boring enough to be interested in such things that the comma-separated list of tags under each post no longer ends with a comma. Until last weekend, the lists looked something like this:

Notice that last comma after "services"? Thats because in the spirit of standards compliance and platform neutrality, the list of links to tag data is marked up as a list of links. In other words, the commas aren't hard-coded in any way. The source for the list should look like this (default MT classes and hrefs removed for simplicity):

<ul>
	<li><a href="#" rel="tag">monitoring</a></li>
	<li><a href="#" rel="tag">server</a></li>
	<li><a href="#" rel="tag">services</a></li>
</ul>

Without banging on too much, the commas are appended in the css using the li:after {content:",";} construct. The problem is, the last-child selector in most browser's implementation of css doesn't work so there's no way to say "apply commas to all li tags except the last one".

The solution is to apply a class to the last <li> in the list so you get something like this:

<ul>
	<li><a href="#" rel="tag">monitoring</a></li>
	<li><a href="#" rel="tag">server</a></li>
	<li class="last"><a href="#" rel="tag">services</a></li>
</ul>

But that is totally bogus, it dirties up what is nice simple semantic markup and what do you do with dynamically generated lists? That's a lot of struggling and a lot of extra code.

I knew I could dynamically assign the class with javascript, or for that matter I could even dynamically assign the comma itself, getting over the fact that IE doesn't support the :before and ":after" pseudo classes (well, IE7 might, but I haven't checked) but I just couldn't be bothered working out the script to do all that DOM traversal.

So yeah, this post is actually about jQuery, the write less do more javascript library.

With jQuery I can do the DOM traversal in one line of code. Here's the code that grabs all the last <li> tags and applies the class "last" to them:

$("li:last-child").addClass('last');

Let me say that again. This is ALL the custom code I use on the page to do this. I just can't help thinking this is wonderful. Imaging what I could do if I actually knew how to code:-)

Anyways, the library is 19k so go grab yerself a copy.

Oh, and while I'm on the subject of exactly how wonderful an extremely powerful library that fits in 19k is, check out this example. You want a groovy carousel interface to select from your application icons as part of an interface you're designing. BUT, you also want the interface to work in text only, that is, you want the xhtml code that creates it to be standards-compliant. What do you do? I'm still trying to work it out, but the source code for the following example looks something like this:

	<div id="carousel">
		<a href="#a" title="email" rel="imagebox"><img src="images/carousel/th_bw1.jpg" width="100%" /></a>
		<a href="#b" title="contacts" rel="imagebox"><img src="images/carousel/th_bw2.jpg" width="100%" /></a>
		<a href="#c" title="calendar" rel="imagebox"><img src="images/carousel/th_bw3.jpg" width="100%" /></a>
		<a href="#d" title="sms" rel="imagebox"><img src="images/carousel/th_lights1.jpg" width="100%" /></a>
	</div>

So not entirely perfect. Not a UL which would have been nicer and no text separation between adjacent links which will cause a WAI validator to barf on the code but still, a screen-reader can deal with a bunch of links with title attributes defined so this definitely could work.

The example is over on the jQuery interface plugins site. This one is called Carousel view the demo page now

Once you've got that, try turning javascript off. You get a static display of images with links to each image. This is very cool from an accessibility point of view. It hints at what we can do with modern javascript libraries like jQuery to enhance our customer experiences without loosing on the disability compliance, future-proofing and ease of code maintenace that good quality semantic markup gives us.

If I find the time to properly finish that last example (I have to modify the author's css as it currently creates superimposed images when you turn JS off which of course isn't the idea) I'll post it here...

If you get an email with a subject something like "[New Challenges] Soandso has Tagged you! :)" delete it quickly. I can't say for sure whether the company (tagged.com) is the next generation of sploggers or spammers gone social or if what happened to me this morning was just a cock-up on my part.

So I got the email this morning. As I follow Web2.0 stuff as part of my job I tend to register for everything to see what's what...

1. I follow the link in the email
2. I register on the site
3. Noticing they're using the gmail api to pull addresses I think "cool" and give it a try
4. On the address listing I mark one of my demo emails as a friend and click on "invite"

...at which point everyone in my gmail address book receives a "you've been tagged" email. This is great, I of course relish the chance to be incredibly rude to friends and strangers alike while looking completely stupid at the same time.

As Tim said in his angry response "Dug, this is a terrible service". Tim, I couldn't agree more.

And finally, dear gmail address book folk, sorry about my invading your inbox this morning:-(

When it comes to open source (and, I imagine in pretty much every other issue) John Kozubik puts his money where his mouth is.

His offsite backup business, rsync.net (which I use and can highly recommend) has just launched the 2007 Code Bounties which is a fantastic way to create pots of cash attached to issues that the OS community feels need resolving. The listed pots are:

• Vmware 5.5 on FreeBSD
• Updating Duplicity and establishing a maintainer
• Working Unison support and long options support in scponly shell
• FreeBSD UFS2 problem resolution and standardised UFS2 stress testing
• Outstanding rsync feature set

As well as just wanting to mention a generally great idea, I wanted to send some linkage to rsync.net--in particular i wanted to mention a service I use which is the Geo-Redundant Filesystem.

The rsync.net philosophy is partly to protect your data (including low-level stuff like log data) from the prying eyes of the US or other governments. With a strong and flexible technology to support you, you are better able to make fair use of your freedoms.

You can store and publish information that your government might not want you to and you can circumvent onerous or restrictive interpretations of international law by any given state. In effect, with a geo-redundant file system, your information is, at least theoretically, never under one governments jurisdiction.

Of course, not living in Pyongyang, I have yet to test the sharp end of this feature in anger of course...

This is great: free server monitoring - check your dedicated or virtual server uptime and get notifications for free - servermojo.com!

I guess now all those folk paying millions for 99% uptime might get a refund;-)

(via: monkchips)

Well, very impressed by the free and so far very reliable wifi on the GNER train to Inverness. I was worried I'd need to be on one of the 'Mallards' to guarantee conectivity but no, things are working fine...

Makes a change from the Eurostar where everything is provided free in biz class. On GNER you have to buy your own coffee and the sandwiches are a bit on the grim side.

Makes me yearn for the old British Rail cooked breakfast. It was a model of solid silver and inefficiency (I think it took like four people to serve it) but darn what a way to start the day:-)

Check out Google's amazing new product TiSP.

Nicely done but I guess you expect nothing less from The Big One:-)

OK, have just downloaded Twitterrific and it is good:-)

If something is private, I recommend not digitizing it and putting it online. Adding privacy features to a public service is dumb. 09:44 PM March 15, 2007 from web

Indeed:-)

You know, I wasn't going to get all huffy about it, but I just don't believe the explanations coming out of Yahoo.

I ignored the many emails explaining how this was going to be a seamless transition and that us early adopters who sent Katerina our cash from day one would be happily assimilated into the collective and that really this was for the best for all concerned. So I finally got this today:

Aside from just not liking their style or their products, one of the main reasons I never got a yahoo id is because the options suck. Well, not in any inherent way, but because they've been carrying a registration database around since 1996 so have more than two users.

Call me a wanker (and many do) but I've grown used to having nice logins, I'm "dug" on delicious and most other places. If not, I'm Bozo (generally for thing's I'd be a little embarrassed to discuss with my mom) or even donkeyontheedge if I'm trying to extend or integrate with the blog.

So of course I tried donkeyontheedge@yahoo.com (and co.uk) and hey, of course they're gone, as are dieyahoodie, dieyahoodiediedie, yahooarescum, filthyyahooscum (which I thought sounded a bit like self-criticism but which Nicki suggested) and any permutation of yahoo and sucks...

Nope, I'm not kidding;-)

So yeah, has this harmed my experience of Flickr, has it impacted our network of one? Well, yes it has. Am I going to stop using Flickr? No. Am I going to stop fantasising about Katerina? Well, probably not but I'm gonna try, dammit. In any case, while I was regressing to the state of a vindictive six-year-old, I finally managed to find a yahoo id that wasn't taken:

This rant inspired by Digital Mavericks: Opal Fruits, Marathon, Jif, now Flickr - Grrrrr! via Technorati.

Been playing with tumblr :-)

This twitter by little_ceeg cracked me up...

Credit scores are like SAT scores for adults.

Thank you joanofarctan :-)

Yay! a bit of a scoopy news-flash, Netvibes just announced the launch of their universal widget API.

Tariq Krim just did the presentation which was (we are assured) embargoed until two minutes ago.

So there you go:-)

Oh, and if you're interested, here is the Flickr set

(This is a Textile rendition of my OmniOutliner file)

• Not a niche
• Web authentication sucks
  • Use same password
  • Which account did i use?
  • Email addresses better
    • But which one?
    • What about out of date addresses
  • Too many usernames
  • Too many passwords
  • Too many forms
• Single sign-on will save us
  • MSN Passport
    • But would you trust these men with your identity?
  • TypeKey
    • Ben and Mena - I trust them now, but what if they turn evil?
• OpenID
  • Decentralised single sign-on
  • Identity is a URI
    • Shows zoomr.com
      • types in url --> redirects to livejournal --> log in to live journal --> grant ID validation --> back to zoomr and login with one string!
    • But...
      • openID attributes (not tokens but still breakable?)
• Is this decentralised?
  • How do we own our own identity?
    • I run my own id server (shows link tag)
      • jyte.com
    • Who provides openID?
      • bunch of folk (6A, etc)
    • Other ways to authenticate
      • dyndns
      • jabber
      • rsa keyfobs
      • secure certificates
• One obvious reason to support openID
  • Build some OpenID shit now!
  • Hey, hundreds of early adopters need to create loads of accounts. Give them OpenID
• OpenID is an example, of dumb networks
  • the intelligence is on the edges
  • OpenID conforms to the same model
• What can we build?
  • Shared profile information
  • Use OpenID to extend the lifetime of cookies
  • blog / wiki antispam because it saves readers from creating yet another account
  • Pre-approved accounts
  • Corp SSO
    • OID server behind the firewall
  • OpenID and microformats
    • hCard
    • XFN
      • You can import a user's contact by introspecting their OpenID
  • OpenID site specific hacks
    • Login with 'X' id to grab the services you need
  • Social whitelisting
    • Share the whitelist with your friends
    • Publish the list of OIDs that you trust to comment
  • Jyte
    • Lightweight trust networks
      • Comment on 'id claims'
      • Jyte group export (sort of like social whitelist)
      • Manage an invite only group using Jyte then hook that into another site's authentication mechanism
  • Decentralised social network
• What sucks about OpenID
  • Phishing
    • Example of "more kittens" website with man in middle attack
      • redirect to evil kitten
    • Possible solutions
      • Card space
    • We can defeat phishing with competition
    • Problem can be solved at the edges
  • What happens in the OID server crashes?
    • One for the applications
      • Cascade through multiple OpenIDs with their account
  • Privacy
    • I don't want my boss to know that I'm a furry
      • Use multiple OpenIDs
        • Pro ID
        • Furry ID
        • Gaming etc ID
  • OpenID is hard to explain
    • Ready for early adopters
    • Need to develop this to be able to explain it
• (Mentions Tom Coates twice!)

Well, had to get Clemmie to school this morning so I missed the first talk:-(

I'm taking my notes in Omni Outliner today, rather that just typing away stream-of-consciousness style. Later I'll have a go at generating a mind map or two (mine never seem to be as wonderful as the ones you see on flickr, wish me luck...)

Here is the OO tree for the presentation by the New York Times:

Khoi Vinh: Managing UI

• What we do what we don't do
  • We do not design the news
    • Story visualisations
  • We do design the platform
    • Exremely high volume of publishing
    • Impossible to art direct every story
    • We do slideshows
      • "Explore the great wall"
    • We do templates
  • Exceptions
    • Special editions
    • Editor and techs work together
    • These exceptions are not compatible with template system
  • Make choices about where to put resources
    • News is templated
    • Tools are limited
      • Instant publishing
      • But not instant design
• The future
  • We hope new tech will let us design in real time
• Content and functionality - from delivery to conversation
  • Shift in consumption of news
    • Consume differently
    • Consume with a different mindset
  • From "talk to" to "talk with"
    • (From one 2 many --> many to many)
  • Content begets functionality
    • memeorandum.com
    • digg.com
    • NYT is building discrete apps
      • MyTimes
      • TimesFile
        • Saving and tagging re articles
      • Times Topic
      • Timesreader
    • Dispersing technology through site
      • No ghetto for multimedia
        • Inline audio
        • Inline video
      • Permalinking through pay wall (yes!)
• The design approach - a new paradygm
  • Evolution of the tension between editors and readers
    • Shows evolution of empowering designers
    • Contrasts evolution of empowering readers
    • Consumers love both high and lo quality
      • HDTV -- YouTube
      • Skype -- sms
      • Times reader --- memeorandum
      • Digital SLRs -- Cameraphones
    • The siren call of 2.0
      • Consumers just want what's useful
      • Don't want basic mission obscured
        • What are the basics? avoid featuristis
  • Management - getting it done
    • A definition of management: "the art of getting things done through people"
    • Not the same for designers
  • Establishing design principles
    • The cost of interface
      • Free isn't really free
        • Additional interface bits
        • Additional code
        • Additional testing
        • Long term support
        • Feature noise users need to tune out
    • The cost of expression
      • In traditional media authors bear the cost of expression
      • In digital media the cost of expression is shared with the user
    • Our applications are machines
    • Over determination
      • "All things are overdetermined. For any single thing of importance there are multiple reasons" - M Scott Peck
    • Options are obstructions
    • Offend experts not beginners
      • Shows bell curve - most users are intermediate
      • But most features are used by experts
    • Navigation within reason
      • You don't need to get everywhere from everywhere
    • Test like you mean it
      • Real users
      • Avoid executive testing
      • Test for usability not acceptance
    • Writing is interface design
      • twitter.com
        • "What are you doing?" the label is part of the interface
        • This has a big effect on content creation
    • Make a thing what it is (affordance! yes!)
      • Let tabs be tabs, let buttons be buttons, let links be links
    • Design, don't decorate
    • Context over consistency
      • Variety, not monotonous (change OK)
    • Use a grid
      • Shows a NYT grid (note advertising doesn't fit the grid)

This 'stream-of-listening' feed was provided for folk that couldn't make the event. In the end I'm not sure it's very useful, so today I'll just take notes and publish more structured thoughts after the event.

In terms of getting a better idea of what speakers actually said, I strongly recommend Lars Plougmann and his amazing mind maps which are both complete and accurate, and are of course released on a CC licence.

And that, folks, was day one of FOWA 2007

DIGG "crowd generated media"

Kevin Rose talks about the Digg ecosystem

• Why should the crowd care?
• Create incentives on every level
• Why should people submit content
• Why do people digg
• Content -> Diggs -> Quality --> WOM --> More traffic --> 3rd party site traffic --> Smart Digg buttons

Now we're talking about enhancing Digg (swarming the story, better fact checking, location-based opinions).

Benefits of Flash visualisation, could make tools to help people understand how their shifting opinions interact with others - visualisations of swarms.

Big announcement, support for openID
(applause)

Stéphane from Soocial

The future of contact management

(does demo mmmm...)

Two nice chaps talking about quotes

http://quotationsbook.com

Very interesting stuff, will need to pass on to a few folk who have been working with citation indexes.

The spotlight section, first up, BT's Stephen Stokols

Converged communication online

Stephen promises us that the wifi cloud might be available for tomorrow (audience cheers)

Four online trends driving shift

• Lines being blurred as online cos move into telecoms space
• P2P proliferation (need to embrace it)
• Advertising funds free models
• 1 to 1 voice no longer good enough - 1 to many is emerging

Telcos need to embrace shifting landscape turn threats into opportunities

(Gordon Bennet, no cliché left unturned)

Shows screengrabs of BT Contact. (kind of looks like what I'm currently working on...)

(free sms etc)

See btcontact.com

Bradley Horowitz Yahoo VP of ADD (Advanced Development Division)

"User rehab, a story of redemption"

Few creators, many consumers

Need to lower barrier to entry

Uses Flickr as an example of how to do this:

Talks about "interestingness" (photographs that have been interacted with more than other by analysis of log data)

Talks about tagging (mentions speed) the ease goes to the lowering of barriers to entry.

Mentions folksonomies

Mentions ZoneTag. Not having to remember the tag for an event (system merges cell data and other info from upcoming.com to come up with suggestion)

Clustering by sense

And now we're talking about pipes, as in Yahoo Pipes, very cool:-)

Pipes is sampling, not synthesizing

We're now asking questions...

Werner Vogels, CTO amazon.com

Here to talk about Amazon EC2 and S3

Web scale computing (compete on ideas not resources)

Alternative resource model:

• Increasing uncertainty
• Move from push to pull (socially, industrially, culturally)
• Move to mashing up on the fly
• Co-creative effect of customers (power of the consumer)
• Greater focus on learning and improvisation

(this guy has so totally read CK Pralahad)

Claim and release resources dynamically

(points out that the pull model doesn't let VCs take such a big chunk of you)

Talks about "Getting Real" by Jason Friedman. Chapter 4, scalling is too hard to plan for at the start.

Don't worry about tornados and SLAs

Only pay for what you use

Examples:

• smugmug.com
• Second Life
• youos.com
• Render Rocket

Mentions the mechanical turk as part of the AWS product family

Check it out at http://aws.amazon.com

Google Jason Chuck

Open apis

KLM in maps (channel 4 ticket price)

Sketchup (promoting user generated)

Talks about tomorrow's discussion of the new apps, spreadsheet etc (and their guy will discuss best practise)

Thinkfree (SOA)

• browser neutral
• speaks MS Office

Free mashup mashup api :-) Let your blog visitors view office documents without using MS Office software

Cool:-)

http://viewer.thinkfree.com/html?url=http:domain/file.xls&action=view&pageurl=uri

OK, gotta try this

Lessons from Last.fm Matt and Anil

Connect people to the music they love

Audio-scrobbling (listen -> share -> discover)

• 15M tracks scrobbled
• 175 scrobbles per second
• 10M artists
• 70M tracks
• 700k tracks streamable on last.fm
• 17M items taged
• 145K artist wikis

Matt is talking about the collaborative requirements of developping a sharing application. Keeping it as open as possible, reward participation as much as possible, be realistic with finances, building engagement from your community, be transparent (downtime charts published)

...people sending us money after each server failure to encourage us to upgrade the server...

establishing an open protocol from the start got scrobbling off the ground. Before long, loads of music players supported the protocol.

Anil takes the mike to talk about growth

What happens to the team?

• The changes when you get to 30-40 people
• People trump processes
• Use simple tools and adapt them

Shows irc transcript from their developer channel (osmotic communication)

What happens to the product?

• Plan for going global
• "everyone's going to want a piece of you"
• Embed your service in others
• Make transition from service to platform (think about your service as a platform)

Liking what you've got to say Anil:-)

Matt comes back

Attention data
Scrobbling data is attention data Powered by AudioScrobbler, Myware is 'spying on yourself'

He shows us the 'events dashboard' (gigs near me)

Anil comes back to talk about monetising attention data

Monetising attention

• Sponsored airtime
• Personalise based on attention data
• New attention metrics
• No more cpm - the scrobble is the unit

Dealing with tag cloud spam

• Censorship is not acceptable in a folksonomy
• Attention data does not lie
• Weigh user tags by volume of attention
• Attention earns trust

Matt comes back to talk about what Last would like to do in the comming years.

• Fewer interfaces
• More ambient findability
• Reduce barriers to entry (hard to start when prefs are not established)

Questions session

The VC bit (Danny Rimer couldn't make it)

mmm...

Simon Wardley

From hot stuff to yawn, the commoditisation of IT

(note that Simon says IT not IS...)

Goes through example of electricity

(Simon is a great speaker, he's doing crowd-pleasing things with graphics - big tag clouds with ducks and ponds)

Talks about yack shaving to introduce the idea behind his startup. Build what you want and pay for what you use (zimki)

Tara 'miss rogue' Hunt

What community is or isn't...

(mentions her blog)

What is community?

• co-creation leading to relationships
• sharing profiles
• User benefits, self policing, increased loyalty

(the 'free' wifi turns out to be a solitary OpenZone base station which is currently struggling to keep up...)

Examples

• Lightweight social processes (voting, digging)
• collaborative information structures (YouTube, Odeo, Threadless, Flickr)
• High end collaboration - Wikipedia, open source projects (Lostpedia)

Themes

• Sense of fun
• Keeping the dialogue going
• Simple platforms
• Compelling stories
• Rewarding community members

(what is it about Wordpress that people are happy to wait for messages like "woa, only x comments a minute, slow down cowboy")

Compares yahoo maps to Google maps:

Yahoo experience totally rocks, Google maps v. empty and boring but: developers currently working with mapping apis 51% Google to only 4% Yahoo!
(stats from programmableweb)

Fostering your own - fertile ground

What is sense of community?

• Feelings of membership (inside the boundaries, do I belong here?)
• Feelings of influence (voice heard, learning from the group, feedback)
• Integration and fulfilment of needs (shared values, the feeling of being supported by others)
• Maslow

Be patient! community takes time

Edwin Aoki

Web-based email leading driver of page views

Dissagregation and syndication

(Dug is beginning to daydream about bacon sarnies and a steamy latte...)

Edwin says "drag and drop" arrrrg!!!

Interesting slide about the developer's responsibility to society.

• Tools must be safe, effective and neutral (v. relevant to the work I'm doing now).
• With great power comes great responsibility. For instance, it's our responsability to ensure that the default behaviour of the systems we build is the right behaviour, the safe behaviour

(and break...)

Mike Arrington

On YouTube: 1 Million dollars a month but it didn't burn because it provides an IPTV service (as opposed to user-generated content).

AMIE St. first self-regulated music market.

Buzz Factor - Solve a problem.

Mike is talking about what makes a successful startup (and what to look for in a failing one. One point is: don't raise too much money).

Offline/Online = Apollo. If you don't use it, you're wasting money. Apollo looks to bridge the overhead of bridging the file system and the cloud.

And we've stopped for questions...

Meet BT Contact :-)

So Iain Tait's getting all memetastic on our ass :-)

Well, to answer your question Iain, I seem to be posting from mostly a kind of Diane Arbusy/David Lynchy sort of shitty hotel room situation. Does that influence my blogging? Good question, I guess it might, but mostly because of time restrictions. Information architecture is a job performed 50% of the time in a jacket and cufflinks and the other 50% in one's pants.

In my case, the blogging is mostly in the pants category;-)

The helping-corporates-move-towards-standards thing started for me when I did a longish contract at an insurance company and helped them embrace semantic markup and the separation of style and structure. Anyways, I've been consulting with these large corporates for a while now, and I'm pretty sure I can safely say:

Drag-and-drop is to web2 what the blink tag was to web1

Which really doesn't scan that well or seem that insightful really... How about:

Drag-and-drop is the new <BLINK>

Well, Russell's just been hit by his first evil little troll.

I suggested he post the links to the swine so we'll see what happens.

I was reminded on my own Troll, a nasty man (who, well, yes, nonetheless made some very good points but just not in a full-size-human kind of way...) called Andrew MacLaren who left a comment which had me floored for a week or two.

I posted the full text at the time but I'm not sure if that helped. Here's a taster:

...by some unfortunate deep linking i somehow landed at your 'website', having spent a few miserable minutes reading your mostly uninspiring and often self-rightous (pap) posts, it would appear to me that in many ways you come across as a borderline wanker, and although that may seem harsh i've just had another look and to put at nicely its a bag of shite! and from what i can gather this is what you actually do!??

Anyway, not going anywhere in particular with this, just felt like pinging some support to Russell.

Welcome to a world of prurience we didn't even know existed. No longer will the currious need to dig through the sleazier end of the tabloid press to get their thrills. We can all now view our serial killers' MySpace page and shudder...

Well, twelve hours after the arrest and it looks like MySpace has taken down Tom Stephens' profile page. Google's cache has flushed the page as well. Chalk this up as another internet milestone, the first serial killer with a website. Of course if the man's innocent we're going to feel a little stupid and I sure hope Myspace has kept a backup...

“But isn’t another coffee place in Portland like bringing coal to Newcastle?� asked an editor at the Oregonian, to which a reasonable response might be, yes, and at how many of these places does the coffee indeed taste like charcoal?

I've got no idea if Ristretto Roasters is any good or indeed if their coffee isn't burnt to shit like Starbucks' but featured prominently on their website is this "free wifi" graphic. So next time I'm in town I'll definitely drop in...

I still can't beleive that we have to pay for public wifi. I mean when you eat in a restaurant you don't pay for tap water or oxigen and even if in some extreme case you do, it's included in the exhorbitant markup you pay on your panini.

Next time someone approaches you with a business model involving walled gardens and in-store portal pages please do thwack 'em over the head with a base-station:-)

Those nice folk at TMW have started to blog. It's a brave step for a traditional agency and one I hope that will energise their collaborative media activities. Getting into the spirit of the thing, they have started debating in public and are asking questions about some of the thornier issues of the day

Disclosure: I helped set up the blog and occasionally post to it.

Also, while I'm doing the link love thing, (on the topic of social and collaborative media) you could do worse than visit The Lecture List you'll be surprised to hear it's a list of lectures:-)

Anyone can post their events to the site regardless of size or funding. The service is free and entirely self-service. It's a completely open system but the content is moderated so please keep the evil horrid stuff to a minimum.

On Vodaphone's total lack of co-creative thinking.

The future for mobile operators is all about charging for real value and ditching the evil charges which--given the nature of the new digital marketplace--will continue to be outed by angry consummers such as Mr De Waele.

So gentlemen, start your dialogue + access + transparency engines:-)

(thanks m-trends)

And how did I miss this one: Second Life Liberation Army attacks Reebok

Yup, an ingame protest attack:-)

Glad to see Iain Tait is experimenting (and, in the process has found a place to buy genitals).

I just read quite an interesting report by Elizabeth Coverdale called Cyberculture and Gender Identification in Online Chat Communities. She looks at role-play, gender reassignment and in particular digs a little deeper into the language people use when "inworld" (be that in full 3d environments like Second Life or simply chatting over an IM client).

It turns out that men and women have subtle differences in the way they structure a conversation. According to Coverdale, women pepper their conversation with meta-messages design to create a mood, they use phrases like giggles or "lol" more frequently than men with an aim of creating a cocoon of aproval and friendship around the conversation. Men will just say what they want in shorter phrases with little or no introduction.

I can't say this has been my experience. I find myself often drifting into a world of emoticons when I chat...

My Second Life avatar is currently a young Korean woman and while I'm still just roaming around figuring out the various inworld dynamics I can imagine things could get a little wierd. (If you take a look at Iain's post and are confused by the pictures, a Google search should give you a clue... and cheesh, I'm reminded I never did find out what the three shells do in Demolition Man)

Community based Content centric URL's on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

This is a link to a guy called vaXzine's stream on Flickr. I first bumbed into him (her?) when he dropped a note on a white board session I grabbed with my cameraphone.

I want to make his whiteboard sessions into t-shirts:-)

Community based Content centric URL's

I'm sure you've seen this but here's a link anyway to a Flickr photoset of Banksy's Paris Hilton CD insert

Mathmatiks.com :: Urban Lifestyle Design & Consulting :: Collections :: High-End Focused Projects

Awesome mathematically-named jewelry. You know, I haven't used the lens-flare filter in photoshop in almost ten years but I thought in this instance I'd treat myself;-) Mathematics is linked to from the San Fran streetwars site, btw.

And speaking of streetwars I've just noticed (sorry--rambling a bit here--bear with me...) a post on digitalcatharsis expressing concern about the Streetwars event currently underway in London. He makes some good points about the likely interaction between the transport system, the security forces and a bunch of sandal-wearing geeks armed with water pistols. His point is of course we're looking at another Menezes killing and in many ways I agree.

On the other hand, I think the game is incredibly liberating. I hate myself for not taking pictures of Clementine in the bath. I love her, I think she's beautiful and I want to have photographs of her in my family album but I don't take the pictures (whether consciously or not) because of the whole pedophile thing. Increasingly, we are self-censoring and self-restricting. We're reducing the richness and depth of our lives because of some sort of media-generated awareness. I think it's fantastic San Francisco is filled with twenty-somethings dressed in black shooting each other with water pistols. It's especially encouraging to see Americans, who totally over-reacted to being bombed reclaiming their freedom like this.

Until very recently, the UK has had quite a measured response to terrorist attacks on its own soil (beautifully exemplified by this policeman's request for members of the public to move) but with crazy anti-terror legislation on the books it might be time for us to reclaim the streets too.

Just got back from UGtv, crashed on the couch and have just woken up to Open University classics. How to give yourself jetlag without ever getting on a plane...

Basically it was reasonably well attended with a few interesting speakers (and good catering too). I was hoping to hear about innovative image and film creation based on partnerships between production, broadcast and audience players. In the end, most talks and their associated questions were largely to do with how cheap UGtv is... More later if I can muster the enthusiasm.

The obligatory YouTube videos and Flickr photo set

Technorati: ugtv, ugtv06

Am off to UGTV '06 — User-Generated TV summit I'll let you know how it goes.

Technorati: ugtv, ugtv06

What a great idea

Thanks to Ross Mayfield for pointing me at Dandelife Ross Mayfield's Weblog: Dandelife. He says:

There is a gap in social software for binding stories in a chronology. For building biographies of people, places and things.

Which gave me a huge nudge and a smile as I've been meaning to post about randomaccessmemory, a project to store collective memories and allow communal browsing of the stored results. It was a beautiful site and a great idea but it happened just before web2.0. It epitomises everything that web2.0 is great for but can't take part (no community, no rss, no tagging, no flickr links etc). Apparently a new version of RAM launched in October 2005 so I could be wrong (I think I last left a RAM in 2001 so it's been a while)

Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, 1Q06

powered by ODEO

So OK, what's with the Numa thing? Could someone explain why hundreds of youtubers were lipsyncing to Numa numa and what is it about this gang that the comments are particularly bitchy?

YouTube - Liberty: numa numa

(watch this one first)

Just came across a fantastic video on youtube. Matt, the guy responsible writes about the adventure on his blog: Where the Hell is Matt? New York, NY It's Done

What I want to know is, what exactly is the connection between Matt and Stride gum.

If you head on over to the Stride site, you'll notice the little dancing character on the bottom-left. See how his dance matches Matt's. Now I'm not suggesting foul play here, far from it--it looks like Matt secured sponsorship from an FMCG company which has allowed him to have a truly life-changing travel experience.

But Matt, could you explain who is the chicken and who is the egg? Is this a brilliant advertising idea or the result of a determined individual's struggle to fund his dream?

Matt?

After mentioning Alex B's post on shaving yesterday, I spotted this today. James Governor's MonkChips: On Razors: We're not consumers we're advertisers

Funny what we pick up on...

There appears to be some debate about the relative superiority of the Nintendo DS and Sony's PSP. Unusually for this kind of online debate, the quality of the language is very high.

shutup timD just cuz u cant afford a psp u can suck my balls

you fucking nintendo whores. clearly. you wanna talk originallity? supermario bros = supermario bros ds. repeated kirby games, there all the same!! i dont see the difference, besides that the ds only does games. psp does video, mp3, wireless internet, photos, and VIDEO GAMES THAT ROCK! i do indeed plan on buying a ds, because the new super mario bros. intrigues me. psp = pc based handheld. ds = two game boys brought together with a "stick" to touch itself with.

dude shutt the fuck up or ill take that stylus and stick it up your uretheral sideways!! (if youd dont know what that word is ^ its your penis whole...jackass)

i bet youve never even played either one

thank you person with actuall friggin' brains!!

...watch me bitch

PSP is better then ds...Accept it. The only thing ds has over psp is games and how the F*** is games better then video,Music and photos combined.

[etc]

I can't say I had ever heard a stylus described as something to touch oneself with;-)

I was gonna get this sexy-looking piece of kit but darn, look at those reviews, one guy is saying it's great, the next it sucks... Anyone had a go out there wants to point me in the right direction?

While I'm at it, have any of you done some sexy hacking with your PSPs? (I'm thinking Movabletype quickpost, VNC or Akype over PSP, that sort of thing...)

With all those "experiences of one" going on out there it gets ever more difficult to know what people are talking about. Check out this comment on a psp-tagged page

no shit. there arent even 200 ISOs out there u g0damm nooborz. custom background is custom on every psp tard. font is an old hack. stop takin my bloody words i only get to say bloody. u prolloy dont even own more then 1 psp.

(Of course because I'm very, very sad I do know what he's talking about, but I'm just wondering how brands are going to embrace infinite customer heterogeneity when it comes to community and language...)

YouTube - PSP modificada

Wired 14.06: The Rise of Crowdsourcing

mySociety � Blog Archive � This is what transparency means

Remember the old corporate anthem, Our vision of global strategy by good old KPMG? It established the corporate anthems meme (it was Chris Raettig who started the meme proper...) which ran and ran with contributions from around the world.

Archive.org has preserved the original (note the back story of KPMG getting the wrong idea about deep linking). Anyhow, imagine my surprise as I bumped into another, a truly awful corporate anthem from German firm Messe Duesselforf (thank you Adfreak)

I guess my question is did this thing ever go away or did we just move on?

But thank you risingslowly for the info. Any Americans out there know what "rising slowly" refers to?

Mainly I'm telling you this because it permits me to use the word "viscosity" and I never get to do that.

I love the way this guy writes. Less crazy about his baking skills though. thanks chris

"360" is the new "My"

Just signing up for a Ning account :-)

Playing with Spout -- very interesting. If you've ever had an opinion about a film you'll love this...

Also, quite an interesting way to redefine an experience. As far as I can tell, it's a video shop, but the experience is nothing like HMV:-)

Great piece on ambient information at Headshift (I feel so left out not making it to ETECH seems like everybody I read online was there...).

the classic open plan layout gives management far too much latitude for interruption and individuals and groups too little room for private work

Well worth the time to get through the whole thing.

Interesting read over on noodlepie it's primarily a blog about foodie stuff, but recently, Graham Holliday has started blogging some pieces he is writing for the NMA (a UK new media rag). What's neat is that he is trying to open up the process of writing as much as possible and is benefiting from the feedback of fellow digerati. Of course, the NMA is a print publication so they've frustrated his attempts to publish early and often...

noodlepie: Writing a feature

His blog is called technogoggles.

So the largest distributor of crap burnt coffee is entering the the music biz...

• Starbucks as a serious media player
• Starbucks Eyes MP3 Downloads

(thank you Influx and Labellife)

PodDater adds RSS feeds to profiles. Online Dating Insider:

Un-bloody-believable. Well, I guess it had to happen, video dating moves to the iPod ("view videos of prospective partners on your way to work"). I guess with rss you can build a subscription to only those types you might be interested in.

So nice little quilt graphic from Yahoo (Yahoo! Netrospective: 10 years, 100 moments of the Web) for their birthday.

When I see this type of thing I start wondering about what was left out...

I can see two things missing straight away

1. Jenicam
2. Google

Any other omissions come to mind?

I'm always on the lookout for interesting examples of bloggers making content together, so was chuffed to see Livejournal users have been creating hundreds and hundreds of Batgirls (thanks Boingboing)

Listening to the old Ricky Gervais podcast thing again. Apparently, after the offhand remark "you could make a dance mix from I could eat a knob at night" the guys received eighty (80!) mix tapes:-)

Listening to the Ricky Gervais podcast on Guardian Unlimited :-)

Dave Sifry asks what are your New Years resolutions?

Well, the one I'm most going to struggle with is finding an alternative to Gmail. After last year's Adsense fiasco (The Lecture List was almost forced off the road the Google dogma juggernaught) and the continuing total lack of accountability that Google appears to be able to bask in indefinitely, I'm still struggling to find a commercial alternative.

My theory was that if I didn't trust Google anymore, I could cancel all my Google accounts and pay a supplier for the service. Paying, while a bit of a sting, would give me independence and a level of service. Most importantly, it gave me some level of control over my privacy.

It's now the 2nd of January 2006 and I've been looking to make the change since last October. I still can't find a service that offers the benefits of Gmail! I've seen a few Outlook-based monsters and a whole bunch of terrible unix 'pop wrapper' apps but nothing that works as seamlessly.

Help me out here ok?

Oh, and speaking of resultions, could we have one between Urkarine and Russia like pretty quickly before this gets out of control please?

The Technorati tag: 2006resolutions

Listening to Radio4. A woman has just launched a book on the Farsi bloggosphere

• Since 1995 100 publications shut
• 70,000 bloggers in Iran.
• Religous bloggers
• Young bloggers (70% of population under 30)

(Guardian article)

Thank you Billy for pointing this out:-)

I still love the internet after all these years

• Scorpio. Interests: Reiki, Capoeira, Fishing, Zen Buddhism
• "Beta" is the new 1.0.

From the Flickr news page entry dated 31st July, 2005

Now you can block obnoxious, unfriendly, annoying, suspicious, smelly, confusing, politically questionable, disconcerting, pernicious, creepy, putrid, dismaying ex-boyfriends, people who want to be your boyfriend who you don't want as a boyfriend, hamsters, people who dislike Mogwai, that girl who laughed at your hair extensions, insurance salesmen, your ex-husband's second wife, your ex-wife's second husband, turtles, astronauts, nose-pickers, people with ugly anime characters as their buddy icon or just about any people you would like to block.

Sometimes life is complicated.

Yes indeed it is. While there's no denying the Flickreens have some awesome copywriting skills, could this have something to do with Yahoo's legal department?

I'm always amazed when the European Parliament sees sense and does the right thing :-)

Annie Lennox is on right now...

This is an idea as beautiful as it simple...

I'm always curious to hear any information that suppports the argument that not making your site accessible is a nonsense. The DDA Centre has nothing to do with website design, but they did have this little snippet on their website:

Disabled people have an annual spending power of 50 billion pounds a year. There are approximately 8.6 million disabled people in Britain.
Source: Regulatory Impact Assessment, Access to Goods, Services and Facilities, Disability Discrimination Act, Department of Work and Pensions, July 2001

Essentially, it is now so easy to make your website accessible, that you're just chucking customers out the window by not making the effort...

Sunday afternoon and my eyes are still going mental. This is beginning to worry me slightly, after all I rely quite heavily on my eyes to do my job. If things haven't improved by tomorrow morning, I think I'll go see the it'll be better in a day or two doc again.

Funny thinking about eyesight--I spend a lot of time at work explaining (cajoling, beating, schmoozing, bribing...) to corporates why they need to support blind and partially-sighted customers. If I was to lose my sight, could I still consult on accessibility issues? I guess my deliverable would change somewhat, currently I focus on the delivery end of things, that is, how do you have to structure and train your delivery teams to make sure your groovy design work stays as accessible as possible without loosing the graphic 'edge'.

I'm guessing I could retrain and spend time doing research for the RNIB or similar. Anyhow, it's comforting to know that the mad mad world of bloggers is actually quite easy for a blind person to participate in :-)

Sitting here in MUF where I work on personal projects thinking about the structure of a huge, museum website and have just noticed that Technorati's tags page is almost 50% non-roman.

Aside from the huge kick I get out of modern operating systems' ability to seamlessly display non-roman characters, I'm getting into enjoying a Chinese world. Clemmie will no doubt live in a Mandarin data-universe, and by the time she's ten I'm guessing not learning a Chinese language in school will seem absurd.

I'm not sure whether I prefer the Flickr 'most recent' or 'random' badges, but one of the nice features of the random badge (which grabs pics at 'random' from your photosets) is that is reminds you of days past.

This wonderful, snowy day just got selected:-)

I was beginning to think the good works of the Asquith Eight were going to go unnoticed forever.

But no! We've finally been indexed by Google...

If you or someone you know has a toddler in the care of an Asquith Court nursery you should absolutely be reading about the West Hampstead horror stories. The fight is currently still going on, but I'm guessing that Mum's united shall never be undone;-)

And just to make this absolutely clear in a linky kind of way, this link is the start page of the Asquith Court Parents Association website.

OK, it's abit geeky, but this story has just had me in stiches:-)

Just fabulous, thank you felicity :-)

¿Ché?

This whole anti-terrorist thing is really getting out of control

(thanks boingboing)

So how did I miss this piece in the Guardian?

Boy I've just worked myself into a lather over at Barnett's blog. Some chap in Canada has been going ballistic along the lines of his copyright is being infringed and his ad revenue swindled.

Alex asked the questions:

• When is it ok, is it ok to render content dynamically/statically created by another author on another site/service?
• What is fair use, what is not?
• Is it ok to take snippets of others' content and republish (as I have done above)..if so, how much is content is too much...10%, 50%, 80%, 100%?
• If you do use a snippet, should you link to original source? (personally I think this should ALWAYS be the case)

For me, Squeezer is a proxy, plain and simple. There just isn't just cause to go after them with a mallet (especially since their service's life will probably be quite short). I commented:

I reckon once content is available online it should be treated as largely in the public domain.

It's no sin to chase audience and ad revenue by repurposing other people's content, but generally, readers want a relationship with a site, and these are best provided by active independent publishers who keep it fresh by keeping it coming.

I think Barnabas Kendall's "Why Skweezer is good for Content Publishers" is a bit ingenuous in places. In any case, he puts his finger on the real issue:

> After all, certain sites (Bloglines for example)
> detect and offer alternative content to mobile
> browsers. In a perfect Internet, this would
> obviate Skweezer entirely.

As handsets improve (and they are--quickly) and websites become more semantic and more media neutral (and I think the rush is now officially on) services like Squeezer will become obsolete. I think we're looking at a couple of years, so not really anything to get your knickers in a twist about.

Besides, I've not yet found an aggregated or repurposed site that I favoured over its original. Or, in other words, while it's no sin, repurposing probably isn't the best way to build an audience.

Finally, I won't say Jim Elve is a psycho, but he's not so much way off the mark as missing the point entirely. For now, Skweezer is a proxy service. Period. Same as websitegarage and the modem proxy you get with your copy of Analog. As a hosted service that isn't a registered charity, of course they whack some ads at the bottom of the page.

I think this exposes a sidecar issue: Google adsense will be rubbish until it adopts standards. Google, read my lips, The IFRAME tag is NOT STANDARD it is a deprecated MSIE extension grrr

If Google let us store the adwords in page memory so they could easily be manipulated, Jim's ads would still be on his page.

The lather I mentioned in the first paragraph is really down to Google's implementation. Adsense is everywhere. It's important, so why not implement it correctly?

More bat than gmail, Dug is proud to anounce he can be reached at dug@postmanpat.com (is there a dangling modifier in there somewhere?)

And now, welcome to Skypecasting

One reason I found the Internet so exciting when it first approached me to give a job, was its collaborative nature.

I mean, it wasn't a case of hey let's agree to work together. It was more let's make a new thing that can't exist unless we all work together. The exchange of human-readable data on a network was new to me. Until then, everything I had come across was both proprietary and binary (well, not exactly, as I was on Decnet in the early eighties, which I guess was largely proprietory but academic-fuelled and not entirely binary). Essentially, there was no looking at the source of something you found useful, exciting or interesting.

Part of this new "view source" culture was the way the servers on the Internet were open. SMTP servers were open relays for mail messages, freely forwarding mail, news servers (NNTP), name servers (DNS) twenty flavours of authentication or directory servers were often freely usable and accessible. The idea was simple--we all give a little and get a lot back.

So why the nostalgia whinge? I do understand the cost of delivering billions of naked ladies to Thirteen-year-old boys the world over made the NNTP servers restrict service and of course the Viagra-peddling scum forced the closing of the open SMTP relay, it's just that I've had a frustrating week trying to configure various networks (with unusual requirements) and have come across some seriously uncollaborative behaviour.

• From Tuesday 24th August 2004 Demon's customer cacheing DNS servers (158.152.1.43 and .58) will no longer respond to queries unless they come from a Demon Customer IP address
• BT ADLS service does not include an SMTP server -- This is just amazing, you can connect to the BT network via a BT phone line, using a BT broadband userid and password, but they still refuse to authenticate you if your email address isn't a BT address. I can't see how this is even legal. I spent an hour on the phone bollocking them but to no avail. I mean, you're hardware-authenticated because of the ADSL line, you could then be software-authenticated by the mail server--hell I even offered to do it over SSL but no, this is one baby BT wants thrown out with the bath water. They are essentially forcing the punter who may not be aware of available premium-rate SMTP relaying services to switch their business to BT:-(
• I would of course never dream of putting Technorati Totty Emperatrix Katerina Fake in a list about non-collaborative Internet practices, but I will include her here as a note on her site adds to these particlar blues:

  Sad, but true. All my archives from 1999-2004, prior to when I turned off comments in July 2004, have been taken offline so I don't have to spend hours clearing out comment spam with horrifying subject matter. I'm sorry.

• Finally, in the spirit of the age, Google is spending money fighting click fraud -- Gosh, a whole new angle to white-collar crime.

I was following a link from Gail's very funny piece on the cli·ché and ended up at The Telegraph (she linked to this piece).

The list of book review clichés was hilarious, but what struck me was this list of available RSS feeds -- who'd a thunk it? A major UK broadsheet offering RSS with the understanding that they might be syndicated. As much as I hate all things Tory, I have to do something to the brim of my cap:-)

Tom Hough recently commented on an older post about BT.

As with a lot of the “enraged mutton” posts, it was a bit of a venting session, but I’ll reprint the BT phone number here. I can’t garantee it’s still live, but here goes nothing;-)

…a very nice lady called Alita calls you and gives you a phone number (an 0800 number no less) that gets you straight through to customer care—no queue, no delay, no option-3, just straight through to the nice lady.

So got a problem with BT? Need to vent? Here’s the number:

0800 800 871

That ends this public service announcement…

Just got this from Demon, my ISP of choice for a number of years:

Please note that with effect from Tuesday 24th. August the
customer cacheing DNS servers (158.152.1.43 and .58) will no
longer respond to queries unless they come from a Demon Customer IP address. This will have no effect on the majority of our customers who connect to our services via Dial Up, ADSL or Leased Line.

Is it just me or does this really suck? Are we seeing the first steps towards a non-collaborative network? A network of compatible but segregated virtual spaces? Kind of defeats the whole concept of the internet really (but then that'll just be my paranoïa kicking in again)...

One
Two (...and isn't weird that there's a "w" in "two"?)
Three

thanks, boingboing

I love these people. The following from http:// www.livejournal.com/users/charlotteu/friends

Do people not care to encourage me to write J/D, or do they not read it because the girl most likely to force gay!Donna on the world wrote it? Or do they just not feedback just 'cause? (I will admit that my Josh/Donna probably isn't as good as those who, you know, actually ship them.) This is something I can never prove definitively, as you can't see how many people read a particular fic. Or how many people liked it. Or how many people are disgusted with you because you make Donna regularly go down on everyone but Josh.

All in all, if B+M want to do the MT thing full time, they have to charge. It's always a sting when something you've used for free goes paying, but in their case there really isn't any other way.

Or, to rephrase, maybe Ben and Mena should just kill MT altogether and just live off the TypePad revenue. After all, it's their baby they can do what they like with it. I think on the whole they feel 'responsible' to the community they helped create.

My complaint is down to the structure of the license. Commercial use (or non-casual use) isn't to do with the number of blogs or authors. I personally publish about 20 sites, but only two or three are 'active' and only one really gets any traffic. If the 'trust' model holds up then I should be able to say that I 'benefit' from three blogs, and should compensate MT acordingly.

I know pricing by page views or logged-on publishing hours is impracticle, but I hope the guys try to find a new definition of what constitutes the benefit we need to be paying for.

(See earlier post re auctioning a vanity spot on educational charity The Lecture List to raise funds for hosting) raised a whopping 6 pennies (sixpence?) from a staggering two (2) bids...

Wireless activists are using bicycles with wireless internet access to allow visitors to the Stop Bush website to post messages on the streets and pavements of New York City. The cycles have an on-board chalk-spraying machine that prints on the ground, and the messages arrive via SMS. The bicycle's rider has the ability to moderate the posts so not just any utterances are set in biodegradable powder.

While this is cool (and reinforces my thinking about the practicality of access points running around the countryside -- Routemaster buses with satellite uplinks etc.) I can't help but be reminded of the bit in The West Wing when (President) Bartlet tells Leo about the US developing a million-dollar Biro to write on the moon while the Soviets used a pencil (I still think Americans clearly have too much free time on their hands) -- thank you (and go get 'em) Wireless Weblog

(As ambivalent as I feel about adding linkage to Gawker Media's virtual coffers, I will say I was pointed to the following by Gizmodo -- and no I'm not a gadget hound at all, I was just looking).

You know you want to :-)

sold, to the highest bidder...

(what will UK charities think of next?)

-d

Hello List, just thought I'd spam you guys with a site I've just launched for an educational charity that lists lectures, get-togethers and happenings nationwide.

The idea is to increase attendance at lectures and get people something more interesting to talk about than the two or three topics they get from the week's television (though of course Buffy, Nigella, Bex and the merry band of gardeners, DIY experts and super-chefs will continue to amuse and amaze between bouts of archaeology).

If you have a friend who is struggling to get bums on seats, the URI to register as an organiser is http://www.lecturelist.org/register_org -- If you think this could help someone, please do pass it on.

Thanks :-)

Dug

Nice of the Dana Centre to provide an open Wi-Fi network.

As long as it goes through port 80 you can do what you like for as long as you like. Very civilized :-)