I just found Captive Portal WLAN Access Server via the Google ads on Alan Reiter's site. It looks like a captive portal system somewhat similar to NoCat but runs on an MS Windows server. [from: JB Wifi]

Listen to Cory Doctorow and talk about blogging on the BBC Radio 4 Today program from yesterday morning. [from: JB Ecademy]

We've been running for a couple of days now and one issue that's cropped up may be a serious flaw in Google's adsense program.

If you run a website that sells a product or service and you've done a good job of optimising your site for Google, then it will appear high up in the list when searching for keywords about your industry. It's then quite likely that ads will appear on the search for those same keywords from your competitors. So far so good. If you then put the Adsense banner on your website, Google will use the same relevance criteria to put your compeititors ads into the list.

Now you can ban ads from specific websites but this might be awkward if you're in a busy area and of course it will reduce your ad revenue. But still, placing ads for your competitors on your website is probably not what you had in mind!

As for Ecademy, I'm still waiting for the ads to appear for Ryze, Friendster and Linkedin. Nothing yet. but we have had comments from people where that person's competitors ads appeared on their profile page. At least those profile pages were well written even the Google effect was not quite what we might have liked. I'm still thinking about what an appropriate approach to this might be. [from: JB Ecademy]

In You've Been Ripped, a reporter uses a packet sniffer and a WiFi card to grab 2Gb of data from the air at a convention. The trawl included, 3 email affairs, 7 credit card numbers, reporters uploads, 4 PCs with viruses, too much porn and loads of email addresses.

So if you use an open WiFi hotspot,
- Use SSL for all email
- check there is a closed lock on your browser when buying stuff
- run a personal firewall
- And imagine that everything you do is being watched

Now since exactly the same should be true at home this shouldn't be hard. [from: JB Wifi]

We've had a problem on the last two nights so I'll be taking Ecademy off line at 12 noon. Hopefully only for a few minutes. [from: JB Ecademy]

I've been getting a few reports from people about IE6 crashing when completing an Ecademy form. given the amount of activity we have on Ecademy, it's hard to see what's happening as it clearly doesn't happen to everyone. I've got a sneaking suspicion that it's the javascript in the text entry field that's doing it. But I really shouldn't be able to crash your browser with anything I can put into a web page.

Can anyone throw some light on this? [from: JB Ecademy]

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]