Arrrrrrgg! Right that's got that out of the way.

There's some confusion about the proper use of Link in an item in an RSS feed. As a developer my approach to this is to look at a)the spec, b)examples and c)the market, ie what does everyone else do. So let's try that.

a)0.91 " A channel may contain any number of <item>s, each of which links to a story, with an optional description. <link> is the URL of the story. Maximum length is 500.". Looks like a permalink to me.

0.92. "Why? When a RSS file reflects the content of a weblog or "blog" site, the structure required by previous versions of RSS was often impossible to synthesize. For example, there is no actual limit on the number of links a weblog item can have." Oh dear. How can a weblog item have more than one link? Only if we're referring to links embedded in the description.

2.0 "link The URL of the item. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/07/movies/07FEST.html". Looks like a permalink to me.

1.0 "5.5.2 <link> The item's URL. " looks like a permalink to me

b)So how about the examples. 0.92 has no item links but in the other two every single example of link is a permalink. In the 1.0 example, every item link is a permalink.

c) So far so good with one exception. Looking at the marketplace, every single example feed I can find that has a link uses the link as the permalink. So regardless of what the specs say, the de facto standard is to use link for the permalink of the item. I'm sure there's a counter example out there somewhere, but I can't find it.

So in all this I can only find two sources of confusion, the 0.92 spec and various comments from Dave Winer. And I find most of his comments on this subject to be ambiguous even when they're trying to clarify what was meant. What bugs me is that 0.92 spec. Everywhere else it seems completely clear that link should be the permalink where possible. But this comment on the reason for making link optional makes it seem as though that wasn't the intention at all. Given the overwhelming evidence, I'm forced to conclude that Dave is wrong and the rest of the world is right (on this point) which is problematic when he wrote three of the specs.

Back to Mark Pilgrim's latest stunt of leaving out link in favour of guid. I have to just quote Mark's words back to him. "LEAVE RSS ALONE!" The core of RSS, going all the way back to 0.91, is good enough. That means using item title, link and description where possible. Taking advantage of link being optional and instead using an element introduced much later in the form of guid is irritating at best and just smacks of being awkward to make a point. If this is making point to create discussion, well fair enough. But if this is what you think RSS feeds should look like then you're wrong, wrong, wrong.

LEAVE RSS ALONE!

The 3rd WorldWide WarDrive is happening right now. Is anyone in the UK participating? [from: JB Wifi]

Camera-phone dos and don'ts - Product Reviews - CNETAsia : DO seek consent before you take shots of strangers. The last thing you should do is to suddenly or stealthily sneak up and snap away.

Especially if you're dressed in drag in the opposite sex changing room at the end of a stag night...

"Look, I'm on the train!" Which reminds me, can you store photos for use later? Like, say, a shot of you in the office in the evening, for use when the other half doesn't believe you're not in the pub. [from: JB Ecademy]

I've just discovered SATN.org: Comments from Bob Frankston, David Reed, Dan Bricklin, and others. Well worth a read. I can particularly recommend Bob on Realizing the internet and We have Connectivity! There's plenty of truths in there for the Telcos and their relationship with the internet, customer and things like VoIP. [from: JB Ecademy]

O2 Plans UK WLAN

So that's another telco getting in on the hotspot market. mmO2 have had some success in Ireland so maybe they can make a go of it in the UK and Europe. "Central to O2's focus is providing business travellers and commuters with high-speed mobile data access and services across Europe via a range of wireless access technologies." I guess that will mean "business" prices as well.

Theres a story about this on The Register as well. [from: JB Wifi]

Keep an eye on this one. Kendra Initiative - Home - Content Delivery Research It appears to be a UK initiative to try to bring independent content (music, film etc) authors to customers in a way that allows money to pass between them. [from: JB Ecademy]

June is now over so here's some statistics about Ecademy and it's steady rise in traffic.


New members each month
Jan 559
Feb 823
March 1094 + 3500 from Beyond Bricks
April 1034
May 1235
June 1261

And currently
7,775 bits of content (blog, story, book, poll)
12,979 comments
13,778 club forum messages
172,495 network messages
399 Clubs

And just to please Thomas It looks like we're about to get another jump in Alexa.

One stat that is fairly static but which I'd really like to see going up is the number of sites that link to us. If you have some control over a website, we'd really appreciate a link. [from: JB Ecademy]

Dailywireless Tests Vivato Good write up of Vivato covering a 40 block area with 6 antennas in Spokane. Would this be a good bet for Westminster City Council covering Soho or do you still need a more open space? I feel sure they'd work to cover Hyde Park!

And are the Vivato antennas going to be legal under ETSI? And if not, why not? I suspect the answer's no as they're using 200mW of amp power with very narrow beams from the phase array antenna. Another reason why ETSI sucks. [from: JB Wifi]

The (not so) secret diary of a blogger in The Times T2 from a journalists who started and ran a weblog for a week. One comment caught my eye.

"After all, whoever got instant feedback from the public on anything they wrote for a newspaper?" Quite. It's well past time that mainstream journalists started talking to their readers. [from: JB Ecademy]

Canadians are smug - : It seems to me that if you want to be a success with XML, and more importantly with one of the few established XML standards in RSS, you need to ignore these people that keep trying to kneecap XML and RSS. The whole point of a "lingua franca" is not what that lingua looks like, it's whether it works at all and whether anyone has used it.

My highlight. If it's not implemented widely, it's just crufty funk.

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]