Inexplicable Flash Crowds enabled by the net, cellphones, IM and SMS.

How it works is this. A group of organisers come up with a plan and print some instructions. They then run a phone tree where each phones 5 people, who phone 5 people, who phone... telling people where to meet. The instructions are handed round at the meeting place and then they converge on the performance. The first one was 10 minutes in Macy's rug department discussing the group purchase of a $10,000 rug for their group living quarters in a warehouse. After exactly 10 minutes the crowd breaks up and everyone goes on their way. There are photos and a description of the first event here.

Two things come to mind. The first is using this for Ecademy networking meetings!

The second is to organise flash demonstrations. I have in mind a demo about motorcycle parking in the City and Westminster. One afternoon, we start the phone tree telling all the motorcyclists we know to congregate at a particular landmark at a specified time. Then to mill around disrupting the traffic for 15 minutes before dispersing. The key is that up to 60 minutes before nobody knows it's going to happen. [from: JB Ecademy]

Lovely.

EE Times UK - Wimbledon scores Wi-Fi ace : Three WLAN access points are positioned next to key locations at Wimbledon's Centre Court and Court 1. These will allow the 50,000 expected visitors to connect to their office or home e-mail or the Internet during the Wimbledon tournament.

Although I do find it slightly hard to imagine the average Wimbledon attendee collecting email while guzzling strawberries and champagne. But then with a digital camera, you could capture the moment when Henman loses and post it straight up your weblog... [from: JB Wifi]

I've added the Google ads banners to Ecademy as an experiment.

Thoughts?

Here's a few quick ones.
- WiFi and Beyond Bricks are producing very well targeted ads. Ecademy less so. I guess this means that Google can't work out what the main Ecademy site is about.
- I can ban certain ads from the list. I've already removed Kleeneze. If there's any you have a problem with, then let me know.
- I'm almost afraid to say this. Clicking on links in the ads turns directly into money for us to help keep the website going. I'm not suggesting you deliberately abuse this, but if this works right, the ads should be well targeted and wirth reading.
- I figure you'd prefer this style of advertising to busy graphics rich animated banners from Oracle and IBM. [from: JB Ecademy]

When Google News provides search results in XML[1], which format of RSS will they use? Will it be funky? Or will they feel compelled to invent their own "Google news schema"?

[1]You read it here first. By September?

Another directory for the well connected traveller. This one is user created and lists hotels with high speed internet access. G E E K T O O L S: GeekTels [from: JB Wifi]

The BBC covers rural broadband via wireless efforts in BBC NEWS | Technology | Broadband entrepreneurs wire the nation [from: JB Wifi]

DailyWireless - Linksys Power Booster Unplugged

According to this, the Linksys Amplifier has been pulled from the market because the FCC are concerned it could be used with non-Linksys APs. The problem is the FCC regs that say that a complete system including antenna must be tested end to end to make sure it doesn't break the power rules. I can't help thinking that there's something wrong here. This is an attempt to regulate the market at the supply end when the devices are now a commodity. All it's done is result in a proliferation of odd connectors from the manufacturers while vaguely "illegal" antennas and amps are freely available. it can be hard but all the odd connectors are also freely available making home builds easy as well. The alternative of policing finished rigs that break the rules and cause interference is much more difficult.

The situation in the UK and Europe is much the same but with dramatically lower power output limits. It's even easier to put together a rig that breaks those rules just by buying or building a moderate gain antenna and attaching it to an approved device.

The real story here is that you should always go for a higher gain antenna over an amplifier as the narrower beamwidth is less likely to cause interference, while the receive gain is likely to be much more. So taking the amps off the market is actually doing everyone a favour. [from: JB Wifi]

BT! and! Yahoo! in! BB! marriage!

Goodbye "BT Openworld", hello "BT Yahoo! Broadband"

I have to wonder why. But then I'm one of those reactionary old bigots who thinks that the killer broadband app is the Internet. And that captive portals and broadband "launch pads" are hopelessly 1997. Hopefully BT Retail's "no frills" broadband only offering won't change except maybe to go down in price. Talking of which, where are the consumer retail price cuts? [from: JB Ecademy]

Another blog search tool has appeared with some funky features and featured funk. Here's the profile page for Ecademy. BlogStreet : Blog Home [from: JB Ecademy]

This is one of those posts about business ideas that might as well be a Lazyweb request. I'll toss it out because I'd really like it to happen in the real world and I'm unlikely to make it happen myself. But if you pick it up and run with it, offer me a job, ok! At the moment it's one of those dotcom business plans Step1) Have Idea. Step 2) ????. Step3) Make Loadsamoney!

Ever since I first discovered computer adventure games, RPGs (Role Playing Games) and MMRPGs (Massively Multiplayer Role Paying Games) I wanted them to leak out into the real world. I wanted some of the puzzles and clues to be out there in the real world, eg "Go to Reality Checkpoint at 7:07 on 7-7 and get X" or "23rd word, pg23, penguin edition of Decline and Fall". Then I came across a group in Finland who had combined Dungeons and Dragons, SMS, paintball and the primitive geo-location of cellphones to make an online game where you picked up virtual weapons at specific locations and attacked people who were physically near you all via SMS.

Yesterday, I heard about an ICA experiment that unfortunately has just finished. "Uncle Roy Is All Around You is a game to be played in the streets of London: Street Players search for Uncle Roy through the back streets, the tourist traps and the leafy boulevards of Westminster with a handheld computer. Online Players cruise through a virtual model of the same area, searching for the Street Players and looking for leads that will help them find Uncle Roy. Using web cams, audio and text messages players must work together. They have 60 minutes and the clock is ticking..."

Today, I came across a Multi-level marketing group called C4 Game Club that among other things is franchising WiFi hotspot equipment specifically aimed at people who want to have LAN Party group gaming sessions (Counterstrike, Team Fortress, Unreal, Quake etc) in public places.

Then there's those TV programmes with the gorgeous Suzy Perry racing about and being directed by people in the studio trying to solve puzzles.

So I'm putting all this together and seeing the potential for a game that involves roaming yoof armed with camera cellphones, WiFi/GPRS connected PDAs and such like, playing interactively with people who are broadband connected but at home and/or laptop connected and at a WiFi hotspot. Mix in a bit of the background from the Playstation game "The Getaway". Add IM, VoIP, speech synthesis and a soundtrack. You'd have online people communicating and directing offline people and vice versa, working in teams and in real time.

Somebody please build this. I want to play it. [from: JB Ecademy]

BBC NEWS | Technology | Broadband black spots still rife : There is still a huge disparity between the town and country when it comes to access to fast net services. The road to broadband is a long one for remoter areas of the UK. Despite the fact that two million people in the UK are accessing the net at high-speed, there are still plenty of broadband black spots.

And you don't have to be very far out in the country. My good friend Leon is maybe 5 miles from the M25 and 2 miles from the A1. All the nearest towns are broadband enabled, but he's just outside the distance limit. Then there's most of Milton Keynes as blogged previously. There has to be an economic solution to this that benefits both the provider and customer. [from: JB Ecademy]

There's been a few cases where people have complained that they have received spam from either outsiders or Ecademy members, direct to their email address. Let me clarify what currently happens.

The email address that Ecademy holds is optionally displayed on your profile.
- The default is that the email address is not shown. If you want to show your email address you have to enable it. Now if people then send you email, why are you complaining!?!
- The profile page is visible to non-members (the word at large) but even if you have enabled display of your email address, it's not shown.
- Ecademy never gives out the email addresses and I don't believe the database has been accessed directly.
- We are considering tightening this further so that even if you mark your email address as displayed it's only shown to power networkers. I'm not sure this is either necessary or desirable.
- And finally, beware the effects of the current crop of email viruses and worms. These take random from and to addresses from people's address book and construct an email subject and body from text it finds that often look quite real. So you can get email from someone that looks as though it came from Ecademy or via Ecademy, when in fact it came from an infected 3rd party that knows both you and Ecademy.

One related area. When someone leaves a message the recipient (optionally) gets a notification. When the target is a power networker they get the full text of the message and the reply-to is set to the email address of the author. This is a convenience for power networkers but it's also a leak of email address information from Ecademy. I like it the way it is, but if enough people dislike it, I'll go back to a reply-to address of webmaster@ecademy.com. It's just that I was receiving way too many replies that were obviously meant for the original author and I don't have the time to redirect these. [from: JB Ecademy]

Over the last year we've had 524 people who've posted a blog entry on Ecademy. So clearly there's quite a lot of people who "get it". Something I've been puzzling over is to try and understand what happens when a significant proportion of you spin out of here and start a full blown weblog of your own. I know there's a few who either already had a blog when they joined or started one some time ago. Now how would it work if all 524 had their own blog elsewhere as well as posting here?

There's actually some critical issues here about the tension between the two trends towards centralization and de-centralization that constantly work against each other. Ecademy gets it's strength from aggregating large numbers of people into one place. But this necessarily limits the individuals because we can't provide everything you need. We're already seeing this in the Clubs where one or two of them are on the verge of spinning away as they have reached the point where they can survive independently of Ecademy and they need facilities and function that we may not be able to provide.

What might happen here is that one aspect of Ecademy turns into a loose cloud of related websites. If this happened I'd want to see tools that made it easy to cross post to both your website and Ecademy. I'd like to see copious blogrolls, links and trackbacks between all the sites. And ideally I'd like to see the ability to continue discussions across all the sites without being specifically aware of where the comments thread started. Perhaps we could have a section of Dailenews that aggregated the posts from all the Ecademy family blogs? And of course, I'd like to see links back to Ecademy on all these sites, ideally with logos.

Looking even further out there, perhaps in FOAF, there's potential for de-centralizing the network message part of Ecademy.

But I'm also very aware, that the side effect of breaking apart what we have into many small loosely coupled parts is that we lose the sense of belonging. Not to mention the effect on our Alexa ranking (!) and ability to keep on growing.

If you'd like to discuss this further and especially if you already run an off-Ecademy weblog, join the Bloggers Club and let's have at it. [from: JB Ecademy]

A Trackback driven collection of weblogs that are blogging the 'weblog_business_strategies_conference' happening now in Boston. More self-referential than the worm ourobouros (that ate it's own tail).

Damn, these people are full of it! [from: JB Ecademy]

Slashdot | Is Linksys Violating The GPL?

Very interesting article that claims that Linksys (and several other WiFi router mfgs) are using Linux in their 802.11g APs (like the WRT54G) without admitting that fact and without following the GPL and distributing source. I should add that it's not at all clear if they are in fact violating GPL although the author of one utility that is included is starting the legal process to get some clarification from them.

But much more interesting is that there are apparently device drivers for all the Broadcom chip based 802.11g hardware reference designs. This is critical because all the most interesting work on Mesh networks is being done on Linux. And right now there are no public Linux drivers for any Broadcom, Intel or TI chip based designs. [from: JB Wifi]

A concise and funny History Of The Internet :
1996: Instant messaging created as a way for people all over the world to interrupt each other. [from: JB Ecademy]

Detailed whitepaper on building a large Rural WiFi network. Wireless Authentication, Routing, Traffic control and Accounting It's also on Slashdot. [from: JB Wifi]

The Register has another article on how a government consultation on the introduction of ID, sorry, entitlement cards magically collapsed 5000 individual online objections into a single petition. They then refused both a request for the actual statistics and still haven't answered a similar question in the house. Meanwhile the reasons now being put forward for the ID cards are different from the reasons that were the subject of the consultation.

Don't you just love representational democracy? [from: JB Ecademy]

ZDNet |UK| - News - Story - Virgin leaps on board with Wi-Fi : Broadreach operates a total of 50 Wi-Fi hot spots in the UK at the present time. Access at all of them -- including Euston, and Birmingham International and Manchester Piccadilly when launched -- is currently free, but charges are likely to be introduced in the future.

I'm convinced that long distance train services are a killer hotspot location. It'll be very interesting to see how Broadreach get the bandwidth onto the train. [from: JB Wifi]

A piece from a comment today.

I've said this before. And I have to preface this by saying that it's my opinion.

I think that where this starts is that Iraq (and to a lesser extent Afghanistan) was a puzzle piece in the grand game. It was to the USA's and UK's advantage to get Saddam out of the way and to get control of Iraq's territory. It would mean greater control over the oil price. It would mean being able to get US troops out of Saudi by providing an alternate friendly base in the area. This in turn would allow the middle East peace process to be kick started while returning Iraq to the role of buffer zone against Syria, Palestine, Turkey and Iran. So lots of politically good reasons. But stuck in the way were both the UN and domestic populations who were not totally enthusiastic.

This is the point where we move from Global political strategy into Realpolitique, SNAFU and FUBAR. Saddam probably had a WMD program once, supplied by the West. His minions screwed up but didn't tell anyone, least of all their superiors to avoid getting killed. Defectors told the West what they wanted to hear. The pro-war elements in West politics (The Neo-Cons) brow-beat the intelligence agencies into phrasing their reports in a way that gave the politicians an excuse. Various intelligence agency operatives took whatever they could cobble together (like plagiarism of 10 year old academic papers) and turned them into briefing papers. The speech writers and PAs to the figureheads further took the summaries of these and twisted them into sound bites that would make the evening news. Finally, Blair and Bush delivered these speeches. With all the political manouvering at the same time in the UN and within their own countries, this was just enough to get away with a War that otherwise would have been impossible as it would have broken so many international treaties and institutions.

Now that chain of lying, half truths, plagiarism, management summaries, spin and rhetoric represents a long, long trip from truth on the ground and polictical will to what we finally heard.

But what is really puzzling is that Bush and Blair had to go so far out on a limb as to say that they had "Firm, verified reports" that Saddam could "launch WMD at 45 minutes notice". That looks like desperation politics with an extreme risk of being found out if it wasn't true. No politician would ever make those kind of definite statements unless they were absolutely certain, or their backs were right up against the wall. And given that there is still no proof that it was true, I think we have to assume that it was the second.

So it's at least possible that Bush and Blair weren't lying and that they actually believed this at the time. In which case the likelihood is that their information was just plain wrong. More worrying and what will come back to bite them is that they viewed the greater prize to be worth a little short term lying. It was a calculated risk based on information they had that they knew was flawed but might have been true. And now they believe that they can wriggle out of any fallout if it really does turn out that they were wrong.

So there you have it, that's my opinion, which counts for nothing. Will it bring down Blair, Bush and the Neo-Cons? Maybe, but probably not. Do the fabled WMDs exist? Maybe, but probably not. Will any of those people be tried for what they said and did under international law. Definitely not. Will Iraq become the educated, rational, successful society and economy that it could be in the next 20 years? I doubt it. Far more likely is a continuous bloody civil war between all the different factions kept more or less under control by an occupying western force, ostensibly there to protect the oil companies and military airfields.

Cynical? Moi? With this T-shirt on and my reputation?