The Blog
02 Apr 2004 Nick Denton's blog of blogs :: AO known as Kinja.
This is a pretty easy to use tool to read the contents of large numbers of blogs. Beware though. It will suck you in to hours and hours of random searching. It's another example of what I've come to think of as Blogs as productivity reducers. They are a actually a vast conspiracy to stop westerners doing any work by giving them more content than they can cope with.  to give you some idea of the growth. Here's David Sifry at Technorati. http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000342.html At 4:35AM PST today, Technorati broke the 2 Million weblogs tracked milestone. The blogosphere continues to expand at an amazing pace, with about 12,000 new weblogs being created every day. We're tracking over 150,000 weblog updates every day, and growing. One of the reasons for this has been the substantial growth in hosted weblog systems like Typepad, LiveJournal, and Blogger, but also a tremendous amount of growth in smaller systems, like EasyJournal and Suicide Girls and moblogs like TextAmerica. Blogging is also growing outside of the United States and the English-speaking Internet, as we've seen lots of growth in non-English language weblogs as well, especially in Russian, French, Portuguese, Chinese, and Farsi. [from: JB Ecademy] [ 02-Apr-04 8:40am ] My run in with Google over RSS has made the papers. http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/3334651
It's mostly accurate... Also here. http://socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/entry/6450235144623213/ [ 02-Apr-04 8:07am ] 01 Apr 2004 Google to offer gigabyte of free e-mail - News - ZDNet Google has announced a test of a rival to Hotmail and other web mail systems. The hook is that they give you a large amount of storage so you can leave your old mail up there where you can then use Google's advanced search to find old entries.
All the major news outlets have picked up on this. There's even a press release. Maybe someone should remind them what day it is? Or is the joke on me? [from: JB Ecademy] We're starting to see mutterings about VoIP phones that have a built in WiFi connection like the Vonage's WiFi phone - Engadget - www.engadget.com
This is an idea who's time has come as providing you can find an open hotspot you can make cheap or free phone calls. The problem is authentication. How do you get past the typical splash sign on screen when you're device doesn't have a browser? [from: JB Wifi] [ 01-Apr-04 8:40am ] 30 Mar 2004 Bob Frankston and his three newly proposed YASNS — EomE [Enemy of my Enemies,] Blind Trust Network, and the Mindless Philatelist Network:
Brilliant! Enemy of my Enemies is a new social network. Unlike the old ones it focuses on the real need to protect ourselves from “themâ€. The Trust Network is the new effort to solve the problem of trust on the Internet. You can simple check a box to say you trust me. The Mindless Philatelist Network. This is the network for people who don’t really care what they collect as long as they have the most. So do you recognise any of these on Ecademy? [from: JB Ecademy] 26 Mar 2004 Times Online - Britain : THE British music industry is getting personal with millions of internet freeloaders who are threatening to bleed the business dry within a decade.
More than seven million Britons download music from illicit websites, according to figures released yesterday, a scale of piracy that the £5 billion industry cannot possibly sustain. To counteract this the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) is introducing American-style "strong-arm" tactics that include court action against thousands of home computer users. Even children could be targeted for breach of copyright. Peter Jamieson, the BPI chairman, said that the British music industry could become obsolete within a decade if the internet continued to offer an "anarchistic free-for-all". He blamed illegal downloads for a 59 per cent collapse in spending on singles last year. Users found to have made available more than 10,000 music files could, in theory, face claims for lost earnings by artists and record companies of up to £500,000. Fans could face jail if they refuse to pay. So it looks like the UK BPI are following in the footsteps of the RIAA and planning to sue their customers. Unfortunately the article is full of the usual half truths. - (the spread of broadband) will allow whole albums and cinema-quality feature films to be downloaded in minutes. Right. - He blamed illegal downloads for a 59 per cent collapse in spending on singles last year. WH Smiths stopping selling CD singles has nothing to do with it, then. - The BPI is convinced that entire musical genres will then disappear, and that record companies will have to focus their resources on a small number of commercially successful artists and drop others. Well that's certainly one business approach. Then we have the statistics from the BPI study. FOR THE RECORD # 18 per cent of UK people aged 12 to 74 — 8 million people — claim to be downloading music # Of this 8 million, 92 per cent are downloading from illegal sources # 47 per cent of downloaders aged 19 and under claim to be downloading more than ten tracks a month # At 3pm on March 24 more than 2.6 million people were logged on to KaZaa, sharing more than 630 million files # Spending on singles dropped by 59 per cent in 2003 and album spending by 33 per cent since 2002 # Heavy downloaders (ten tracks per month) spent 48 per cent less on buying music # 22 per cent of non-downloaders expressed intention to begin # 14 per cent stated intention to download full albums through broadband (5 million UK homes will be connected in 2005) # 375 million recordable CDs will be sold in UK in 2004, most to make illicit recordings Without getting into the moral arguments, if you use file sharing you would be well advised to read the EFF article on How Not To Get Sued By The RIAA For File-Sharing (And Other Ideas to Avoid Being Treated Like a Criminal). The key one is to turn off file sharing/allow uploads and don't make your copy of Kazaa a Supernode. At the end of all this, I'm surprised we don't hear more about the BPI and RIAA going after the real pirates who produce copies of physical CDs in bulk. I've certainly seen figures that suggest that this loss of revenue vastly outways file sharing on the net. And it's real lost revenue as people are paying for real product. More here on The Register who makes this point. The organisation points to filesharing as the cause of falling record sales. It says spending both on albums and on singles have fallen in the last 12 months, by 32 per cent and 59 per cent respectively. It is hard to imagine that filesharing has had no effect on sales of music, but it is also a bit much to expect us to believe it is the sole cause of this decline. The vast majority of downloading is track-led, and few people download whole albums. Also it is worth noting that it quotes spending as falling, not units sold. In fact, singles sales have been taking a hammering for sometime, and the BPI itself points out that the price of albums has fallen noticeably recently, with half of all CDs sold costing less than £10. [from: JB Ecademy] 25 Mar 2004 I suspect I'm not alone here in having a child who's doing A levels now and who will be looking for a gap year job in July/August for 6-9 months before University. The difference is that I've got two!
So can anyone help place them? They're a girl and a boy, intending to do History of Art and Engineering, bright, intelligent and reasonably responsible. We're living just North of London so anything in N-Central London would do. Needless to say they haven't a clue what they want to do but can turn their hand to most things or at least make the tea. money is important (isn't it always) but they're cheap. If you can help, drop me a line. [from: JB Ecademy] [ 25-Mar-04 3:10pm ] Techdirt Corporate Intelligence: Techdirt Wireless How Do You Say Hi To Someone On Your WiFi? : Well, I'm glad I'm not the only one who has thought about this idea. Danny O'Brien has his WiFi connection left open at his house. Despite all the fear mongering about such things, O'Brien has been careful to make sure that any important data is secured - and he's happy to let anyone close enough to his house share in the WiFi bandwidth goodness. He discovered that at least someone is using it, when he noticed he was sharing his iTunes collection via Rendezvous. So, now, he's wondering how can he contact the guy who's using his WiFi.
The only thing I do is to include my street address in my SSID. I'd really like to see AP manufacturers include a simple NoCat splash page into their systems. It seems to me that we ought to provide facilities to deliberately share our connection as well as providing the tools to lock it down. The current consumer grade APs are also woefully short of logging tools to track who's actually using the system. [from: JB Wifi] 24 Mar 2004 Unofficial YASN[1] gathering, Smiths in Smithfield. Thursday 25th March. 6pm onwards.
It's not official. There's no reason for it. It's just an excuse to meet people from Ecademy, Tribe, Orkut and R*ze and have a drink with them after work. See you there. [1]YASN = Yet Another Social Network [from: JB Ecademy] [ 24-Mar-04 6:10pm ] For the 520 Ecademy pollsters who apparently don't know what RSS is, I give you Wired's RSS cheatsheet.
5 Ways to Get Hooked Up • Bloglines www.bloglines.com Runs on most browsers and PDAs. Free. • FeedDemon www.feeddemon.com Runs on most Windows operating systems. $29.95. • NewsGator www.newsgator.com Runs on top of Microsoft Outlook. $29. • PocketRSS www.atomicdb.com Runs on Pocket PC devices. $5. • My Yahoo! add.my.yahoo.com/rss Runs on most browsers. Free. [from: JB Ecademy] 22 Mar 2004 I've just produced a bunch of buttons that can be used to link to Ecademy on your site.
 http://www.ecademy.com/images/logos/ecad_80_15a.gif http://www.ecademy.com/images/logos/ecad_80_15b.gif http://www.ecademy.com/images/logos/ecad_80_15c.gif http://www.ecademy.com/images/logos/ecad_80_15d.gif http://www.ecademy.com/images/logos/ecad_80_15e.gif http://www.ecademy.com/images/logos/ecad_80_15f.gifIf you want to fiddle with these, try the button maker. Send me the results and I'll include them here. To include a button on your site use these html snippets, changing the 9999s to your Ecademy ID number and change the image URL to one of the above. This links to your profile page.  Or use this one to link to the home page. Although I've included full URLs to the image on the ecademy webserver, I'd obviously prefer that you copy the image and host it yourself. [from: JB Ecademy] [ 22-Mar-04 1:40pm ] 19 Mar 2004 FrontPage - mySociety.org Wiki : mySociety has been awarded £250,000!
The 5 projects are Civic Democratic Renewal Nice to see the system paying people to poke it with a stick! The money came from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister's "e-Innovations" initiative. [from: JB Ecademy] [ 19-Mar-04 7:40pm ] In the London Times today. "Plans to fit mobile phone aerials in the London Tube so that mobiles work while underground were put on hold after it was thought that the bombs in Madrid were activated via cellphones."
Hmmmm? [from: JB Ecademy] [ 19-Mar-04 9:10am ] 18 Mar 2004 So here I am researching Virgin's latest WiFi offer on UK trains and in stations. It's provided by ReadytoSurf so I go their website. I see a link marked "Register for free wifi", click on it and get 404 Not Found. Are they trying to tell me something?
[from: JB Wifi][ 18-Mar-04 3:40pm ] If you see any performance problems today, please let me know. Either by comments here, email or IM. To keep the noise down, don't bother to post if it's good. If you do get a problem please visit this site and note down the 4 values.
Right now the only people I can see having problems are a couple of addresses in Singapore, the Alexa spider and someone using Virgin dialup. [from: JB Ecademy] KRT Wire | 03/17/2004 | London's West End Deploys WiFi Camera Network to Deter Crime : digital CCTV cameras have been attached to lampposts and networked with wi-fi software so high quality digital video can be stored on Westminster council's computer network and accessed at any time by the authority, the police or any other public body. The first 100 cameras are already in operation in Soho
So has anyone tried to hack into this? What security have they put in place? Are there any confirmed sightings and known locations? I think there's a good argument that these should be public access but I don't expect Westminster to agree. [from: JB Wifi] [ 18-Mar-04 8:40am ] 17 Mar 2004 The Register : AMD's move to offer free Wi-Fi comes as a number of budget hotel chains in the US have similarly started to offer gratis wireless Internet access in a bid to compete with higher end hotels for business customers. All 2300 Best Western locations will offer free Net access by September. Marriott's 1200 budget Courtyard, Residence Inn, TownePlace Suites, SpringHill Suites and Fairfield Inns will get free Internet access this year.
Another sign of the continuing drop in hotspot prices to zero. It's not clear exactly what AMD are doing and it may be nothing more than a branding exercise on existing sites. But it's still to be welcomed by consumers. [from: JB Wifi] [ 17-Mar-04 3:10pm ] When: Thursday, 25 March - 6:00pm to 11:00pm
Where: Smiths Of Smithfield, 67-77 Charterhouse Street, London, EC1M 6HJ, UK Description: A meeting originally organized by the Orkut London community. Now spreading into the Tribe, Ecademy London communities as well. Members from a community beginning with R and ending in E are also invited. URL: http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=meeting&mid=4419 Which makes me wonder. Why isn't there an all-purpose London Ecademy club? [from: JB Ecademy] [ 17-Mar-04 8:10am ] 16 Mar 2004 When: Thursday, 25 March - 6:00pm to 11:00pm
Where: Smiths Of Smithfield, 67-77 Charterhouse Street, London, EC1M 6HJ, UK Description: A meetup originally organized by the Orkut London community. Now spreading into the Ryze, Tribe, Ecademy London communities as well. URL: http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=meeting&mid=4419 Which makes me wonder. Why isn't there an all-purpose London Ecademy club? [from: JB Ecademy] [ 16-Mar-04 9:40pm ] 
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