In this Net4Nowt :: News Story, Bulldog (the high speed ADSL broadband ISP) are introducing a WiFi package aimed mainly at home users. This is a pretty standard DLink AP-Router, pre-configured and packaged for easy connection to your Bulldog broadband. As far as I can tell their T&Cs do not prohibit sharing bandwidth but I could be wrong about this. [from: JB Wifi]

I almost hesitate to start this, but I have it on good authority that I'm an arsehole, so I will anyway. ;)

With all the continuing banter about echo, funkiness and naming, I wonder if we're losing sight of something. The reason RSS mostly works is that there is a hard core of specification that everyone follows regardless of camp affiliation.

Perhaps *everything* else is just cruft that stands or falls in the marketplace of implementation. I don't care if it's <myTag> or <myNamespace:myTag> If only a few people use it, then it's fairly irrelevant. But if it solves a problem for you, go ahead. And if you think you can get other people to use it, go ahead and try and make it become a de facto standard.

But please don't screw with the core.

Now here's my interpretation of the core that's common to all the versions of RSS, and it's both needed, required and sufficient.

<channel>           //1 and only one

    <title>          //optional

    <link>           //optional

    <item>           //0 or more

       <title>       //optional

       <link>        //optional

       <description> //optional

With these notes:
- Try for well formed XML and encode "&". Especially in <title>s.

- Embedded html in title or description elements should be entity encoded once. Or wrapped in CDATA.

- Play nicely and try and make any embedded html well formed. Especially if you create the description by truncating your original article. And limit your output to non-aggressive html. Particularly, avoid block structure html like <table>.

- There are 5 elements above that are optional but they're also desired. You need a very good reason for leaving any of them out. For instance if your source has no titles, then that's a good reason for leaving out <item>.<title>. But if you have links and text, then put in <link> and <description>

- If <item>s are describing blocks of text on a web page somewhere, then <link> should be the URL of that block of text (usually known as the permalink) unless you have a very good reason to do otherwise. Of course, if your blocks of text have no URL, that's a good enough reason.

And that's it.

IMHO, everything else is just crufty funk.

There's been enough complaints now that I've been convinced. So the next stage in the experiment is that Google ads have been turned off on the profile pages of Power Networkers.

If you actually wanted the ads on your profile page, I'm sorry but I'm not going to start putting in switches so individuals can turn them on or off on particular bits of the site.

From some of the comments, it seems that some people think we have some control over what ads appear where. I should just make it clear that we have no control whatsoever once we tell Google to display an ad. Google's choice of ad is completely automatic and based on what Google knows about that page. If they have no knowledge of the page, then they put up charity ads which don't generate money for anyone. Since real ads appear across almost the whole site, we can therefore assume that Google has indexed almost every page.

One last question for the people who didn't like to see the ads from competitors. It's quite likely that at some stage in the future we will be taking banner ads via an agency rather than via Google. At that time, we're likely to be showing ads from larger companies. This may or may not give us control over what's shown. So here's the question. Would you put up with seeing an ad on your profile page from someone like Oracle? After all there's bound to be someone who is in competition with them no matter who the ad is from.

And the bigger question. How do you feel about advertising on Ecademy in general? Given the traffic we're now getting, this ought to be a significant revenue earner. So if you really don't want them, please suggest some alternate sources of equivalent revenue. [from: JB Ecademy]

Way too much information in MMS Redux: Betting Against the Telcos. If you're remotely interested in MMS, you should read this. [from: JB Wifi]

Some coverage on Reiter's Wireless Data Web Log and WiFi Networking news Here's the conference website and the main reports.

As Jupiter run weblogs for their analysts and they're organising/sponsoring the show, I wonder where their coverage is at. [from: JB Wifi]

According to The Register, the RIAA in the US is preparing for mass law suits against people who run file sharing programs such as Kazaa and are sharing large numbers of music files. Right now, they've essentially failed to take down the networks by going after the software providers. And they've won a ruling to get users names and addresses from ISPs.

This is going to get interesting. It's also going to be hell for a large number of private individuals. Will we see everyone hit the checkbox that says "don't share my files" resulting in the collapse of the networks? Or will we see the US courts stop the RIAA in it's tracks? And will the litigation spread outwards from the USA to the rest of the world?

And as an aside, will we see the RIAA attaempt to do more to reduce the 30% of all physical CDs sold worldwide that are counterfeit? [from: JB Ecademy]

The new Google Toolbar has a blog this button that is hard coded to work with Blogger. This seems inevitable, but also sad. It would be very cool if someone could hack this to work with other blogging systems.

While we're at it, here's a couple more lazyweb requests.
- A version of the Google toolbar to work with Mozilla and Firebird.
- A version of the Alexa toolbar again for non IE browsers.
- An open method of obtaining the Google page rank.

Seen on DailyWireless - Cable's Wi-Fi Play. Motorola have two new boxes available. They combine a cable modem with the usual 802.11b or 802.11g access point, router, 5 ethernet ports, firewall etc etc.

The article points out that very few cable companies allow you to share the link. However NTL at least don't mind you sharing using WiFi as long as you only use it inside your home with no more than 3 devices that you own. [from: JB Wifi]

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]