I've just uploaded the first cut of a php FOAF parser for use in applications that need to read FOAF without needing to understand RDF. You can find it here.

Here's the readme. There's a test rig here.

Copyright:

  Original written by Julian Bond 

  This work is in the public domain:

  SEE: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/

  So do what you like with it!



Description:

  A general purpose Person Class for use when reading FOAF into 

  non-FOAF aware Applications. It assumes that the FOAF file is a 

  personal profile  document for a single Person. It attempts to locate 

  this person using a  heuristic that works from an explicit PrimaryTopic 

  downwards to guesswork.



  Requires RAP v0.8 http://www.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/suhl/bizer/rdfapi/

  A cut down copy of RAP v0.8 is included in the zip in the sub-directory

  api/ with unused files commented out in RdfAPI.php. Please note that the

  above license info only applies to this file. RAP has it's own license.



Usage:

  $data = foafPerson_FetchDataCurl($url);

  $thePerson = new foaf_Person($data, $url);

  print "<pre>".print_r($thePerson->values)



Data:

  $thePerson->model gives access to the underlying RAP memmodel

  $thePerson->Person is the single top level person

  $thePerson->values is a sparse array of values of types keyed 

  on the tag name.

  - Literal

  - URI

  - geo

  - Vcard address

  - knows Person



  eg.

  values["name"][0]

  values["weblog"][0]["uri"] or ["title"]

  values["based_near"][0]["lat"] or ["long"]

  values["ADR"][0]["Street"]or["Locality"]or["Region"]

or["Pcode"]or["Country"]

  values["knows"][0]["relationship"] or ["person"] where Person is 

 of the same form as values but without any knows array



Extensions:

  It's fairly easy to add new namespaces into foafPerson_ns() and

  namespace tags into foafPerson_rdfTags() The array of tags has three 

  elements

  [0] associative key into the namespace list

  [1] tag name

  [2] tag type



  New types can be added into the foaf_Person constructor with a 

 corresponding new function to create the array.

Microsoft Research DRM talk Cory Doctorow

This is a beautiful piece of work. It's the transcript of a talk Cory Doctorow from the EFF gave to Microsoft Research about the perils of Digital Rights Management and why MS should keep DRM out of products like Media Player.

The argument comes down to 5 points.

1. That DRM systems don't work
2. That DRM systems are bad for society
3. That DRM systems are bad for business
4. That DRM systems are bad for artists
5. That DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT

Particularly interesting is that last one and uses the example of Sony. During the early days of video recorder's Sony fought back against the entertainment industry and won a judgement that recording programs and tapes was fair use and the manufacturer of the device could not be held responsible for that use. That judgement was instrumental in creating the huge video industry we know today. This time around Sony bought a major entertainment corporation and ever since has been wasting time with a succession of hardware devices that are crippled with DRM. The end result is that they have effectively lost a whole series of markets beginning with the personal music player.

Microsoft is one of the few companies with a media player that is big enough, arrogant enough, independent enough and with enough spare cash to simply stand up to the entertainment industry and stick two fingers in the air. Unlike Apple or Sony, MS don't need an iPod or iTunes to survive.

Anyway, Cory's piece is quite long and detailed but if you're remotely interested in the future of music, video, consumer rights and DRM, you must read it. [from: JB Ecademy]

SWAD-Europe: FOAF Workshop @ DERI Galway (1-2 Sept 2004)

The first two suggestions

# Social network metadata standards
# Trust issues in social networks

mean that this is an important workshop for us. [from: JB Ecademy]

Why You Should Dump Internet Explorer - Lockergnome's Tech News Watch is a well written article by an MCSE.

Rather than accusing me of Microsoft bashing, why not read the article and make you're own mind up.

BTW. Firefox V0.9 is now out. Next week, "Why you should dump Outlook". [from: JB Ecademy]

New Preview Release of Firefox - Lockergnome's Tech News Watch

New releases this week of Firefox, Mozilla and Thunderbird. [from: JB Ecademy]

Go ahead and vote here. How Many Social Networking Services Do You Actively Utilize? - The Social Software Weblog - socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com [from: JB Ecademy]

TheyWorkForYou.com: Is your MP working for you in Parliament? Here's Cory Doctorow's words about it.

TheyWorkForYou.com -- a project from the FaxYourMP team -- has launched today. This is the most amazing, subversive piece of political webware I've ever seen. It scrapes the Parliamentary record and makes the entire thing commentable, searchable and permalinkable. It compiles stats of which MPs vote against their parties most often, which ones speak most often, which have made the most motions and so forth. I've been beta-testing it and the code and UI are brilliant. It's like they've poured Parliament into LiveJournal -- and in so doing, have cutg overnment down to a human-addressable scale. We need one of these in every country in the world.

[from: JB Ecademy]

NotCon: golden age of the geekesque

What: NotCon '04 - an informal, low-cost, one-day conference on things that technologies were perhaps not intended to do.

When: 11am-7pm, Sunday June 6th, 2004.

Where: Imperial College Union, Beit Quad, Prince Consort Road, South Kensington SW7 2BB (nearest tubes South Kensington and Gloucester Road).

Cost: £4.00 on the door, £3.00 concessions (ie students, under 18s, journalists, OAPs, the unemployed, any webloggers not covered by one or more of the previous categories).

Also at http://www.xcom2002.com/nc04/

Be there, or be a real person with a life. [from: JB Ecademy]

Like OD2, iTunes, Sony, the new Napster or Allofmp3.com? What was your experience like?

I ask because the BPI has put out a press release that legal online downloading services are turning around the drop in industry revenues. It's the usual glossy half truths!

What you actually get is expensive, DRM protected, low quality, tracks. iTunes makes you jump through hoops to move your music from one device to another. Sony is in their own proprietary ATRAC 3 format so you have to use their software. And as for Napster in the UK, £1.09 per track + £0.99 per burn of the same track. They're havin a larf! I haven't tried OD2 so can't really comment.

Funny that nobody's mentioning allofmp3.com much since the initial burst of publicity. This is the real future of music distribution. $1 per CD, quality encoding (MP3 LAME -standard 192Kb vbr), accurate ID3 tags, no DRM. I've *bought* more music in the last 3 weeks from them than I have through normal channels in the last 3 months. I've spent more on downloads than I did on CDs. And I've stopped messing even with P2P programs like Soulseek as it's so much more convenient, fast and accurate. I really can't fault it.

One of these days maybe the labels will realize that the real problem with their sales is the price. Or maybe not. [from: JB Ecademy]

A thought from the weekend.

Google is very very good at only showing results in what it thinks is your native language. This means that if you speak English and do your search queries in English, you hardly ever see websites in other tongues. This then gives you a distorted view of reality as if the internet is exclusively English and predominantly from the USA. This is not true, even though the USA is still the biggest source of internet content.

So is Google giving us a distorted view of the web and hence of the world? I don't believe that's one of their goals, but it's a curious side effect of them being so good at giving the customer what they want.

There's probably a thesis in here as well about how it re-inforces provincial attitudes world wide but that's another story. [from: JB Ecademy]

I'm looking for a set of wiki code that runs on php, mysql and is going to be able to use an external user table for authentication. Can anyone recommend anything?

I've been trying to get phpWiki to work but without success. The changelog for 1.3.10 doesn't fill me with confidence. If you've got some experience of making phpWiki 1.3 work I'd like to talk.

Or should I just give up on php and start looking at perl wikis instead?

Please email me at julian.bond @ voidstar.com if you can help.

Are you a Photoshop expert who fancies a bit of fun work on the side? Are you generally anti the Bush/Blair Axis of Coalition? Then here's a fun little project for you.

Can you fade in Bush and Blair's faces onto this poster or one of the other copies out there on the web?



BTW, there's a new Get Your War On cartoon.
"Come on June 30th! Come on baby! Almost there!
"... Whatever. You know what it's gonna be like in Iraq on June 30th? It's gonna be hot and dusty"
"Maybe. But July 1st is gonna be AWESOME!"

There's a press release doing the rounds from a Harris Interactive Poll called "Kids know downloading music is illegal".

Now IANAL, but I certainly thought that there was nothing illegal in any jurisdiction against downloading. It was uploading and sharing that was (probably) illegal. Or is the BSA claiming that downloading software is the same as the offence of "receiving stolen goods"? If they are then why aren't they pressing charges on that basis? In the USA at least, all the law cases have been against people sharing large numbers of files, not those downloading large numbers of files. And I say "probably illegal" because to my knowledge no case has been brought to trial and so there's no case law anywhere to add weight to their claims.

Maybe I'm just arguing semantics here, but I'm getting really tired of the BSA, RIAA, MPAA and all the other dinosaur pigopolists equating
Fair use == Breaking DRM == Copying == Downloading == Sharing == Stealing

Wouldn't it be better and more accurate to title the article "Kids know sharing music is illegal". [from: JB Ecademy]

Kurt Vonnegut produces one of his wonderful essays that is so filled with sound bites, you almost miss the message. Cold Turkey -- In These Times :

I'll ruin it for you by just quoting the last two lines.

Here's what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.

And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we're hooked on. [from: JB Ecademy]

Help: I Got Hacked. Now What Do I Do? - Lockergnome's Tech News Watch :
So, you didn't patch the system and it got hacked. What to do? Well, let's see:
You can't clean a compromised system by patching it.
You can't clean a compromised system by removing the back doors.
You can't clean a compromised system by using some 'vulnerability remover'
You can't clean a compromised system by using a virus scanner.
You can't clean a compromised system by reinstalling the operating system over the existing installation.
You can't trust any data copied from a compromised system.
You can't trust the event logs on a compromised system.
You may not be able to trust your latest backup.
If you have a system that has been completely compromised, the only thing you can do is to flatten the system (reformat the system disk) and rebuild it from scratch (reinstall Windows and your applications).

This advice came from Microsoft Technet.

Are you scared yet? Maybe keeping up with the patches, not opening unknown attachments and not downloading and installing disreputable software is a better option.

Or you could stop using all those "free" Microsoft products and try some alternatives. [from: JB Ecademy]

Gosh!

Google Groups Beta 2 is now a direct competitor to yahoogroups. As well as Usenet:-
- You can now start mailing lists
- You can subscribe to usenet groups as if they were email mailing lists

And here's the kicker,
- Every group has one or more atom feeds.

http://groups-beta.google.com/
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/rec.motorcycles.racing
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/rec.motorcycles.racing/about
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/rec.motorcycles.racing/feeds
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/rec.motorcycles.racing/feed/msgs.xml
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/rec.motorcycles.racing/feed/topics.xml

Now where's the atom or rss feed from Google news, Froogle, Images?... [from: JB Ecademy]

I'm in the middle of trying to puzzle out a tricky programming problem. 15 minutes later I realized that I'd completely lost the plot when I had a Skype instant message, an MSN instant message, 3 incoming SMS and the phone rang.

That's it, the phone's off the hook, my cellphone is turned off, MSN and Skype are turned off. If you need to get in touch send me an email. I'll deal with it in my time not yours. Am I being too extreme? Oh dear, I see I've got another 20 emails where I'm on the cc: list but have no real interest in the content and those are buried in the 50 virus warnings and spam that all my filters didn't catch.

Seriously, how does anyone get anything done in this modern life? When I was in corporates you couldn't actually do any work for meetings. Now I'm working from home, I can't do any work for interruptions.

I don't know. I love all these new forms of communication just as long as I'm in control. But I'm beginning to really hate the ones that demand attention where it wasn't me that initiated the conversation. [from: JB Ecademy]

The display and sort of ratings on your network list on Ecademy has been broken for some time. Also the Friends of Friends list wasn't working right either. Well they're both now fixed and working the way they're supposed to.

A bit of clarification. Friends of Friends is a composite of everyone who knows you or knows someone you now. Is that everyone within 3 degrees of separation? As you'd expect if you know Thomas Power or one of the other top networkers, your FoF list will cover everyone who is anyone! [from: JB Ecademy]

For those of you who feel they need it, there are now two extra settings on the profile visibility controls.

- Hide from guests. This hides your profile from people who are visiting the website but are not logged in and hence probably not members of Ecademy.

- Hide from search engines. If the above setting is off (ie guests can see your profile), this inserts a command to tell the search engine not to index the page but to follow any links it finds. If your profile is hidden from guests, it's obviously also hidden from search engines.

Both settings default to off and hence to openness.

Just to clarify, you should assume that anything you post on Ecademy is visible to the world and to search engines. The exceptions are:-
- Profile detail under the control of the above visibility controls.
- The forum and membership of Private Clubs
- Network messages
- Meetings and attendance at meetings that are set to anything less than "Anyone". [from: JB Ecademy]

This is several emails stitched together so doesn't flow as well as it should. But I think it needed publishing.

At the height of the B2B period I did quite a lot of work on understanding conversations in terms of one-few-many to one-few-many so traditional publishing is one-to-many; most plain email is one-to-one; most blogs are one-to-few; mailing lists are few-to-few; and so on.

YASNs do answer some needs that are not currently provided elsewhere.

The key one is enabling initial one-to-one communication between people who don't know each other. The centralised system can provide a venue for this where the initial contact is at arms length and so "safe". Given that the this initial contact often leads quickly to traditional one-to-one methods like phones and email, it's only the initial contact that matters. It might be possible to de-centralise it but we'll have to do a lot more work on standard ways of anonymity, encryption and search. FOAF and Socialgrid deal with the search bit but assume that complete transparency is ok. It may be OK for geeks and self-publicists but it's not ok for everyone else.

The second one that Ryze, Tribes, Ecademy, Orkut, Yahoogroups, Meetup, and discussion boards answer is the need for few-to-few group communication. The Blog community is trying to bolt this onto a one-to- many system with comments and trackbacks and frankly it sucks. Trying to track and remain involved in group discussion that happens across multiple comments threads on multiple blogs really doesn't work very well. phpBB, Mailman and hosted sites like quicktopics or communityzero have dropped the barrier to entry and Yahoogroups has dropped it to zero as long as you can put up with the ads. For the YASNs that provide this feature it's been quite successful but it's quite hard to understand why when the implementations aren't very good compared with the dedicated systems. Also this area could really do with a good dedicated search engine.

The effects on monetizing YASNs

So YASNs and YABNs (Yet Another Business Network!) do fulfil some fairly basic needs in people. We're still on the first generation so most of them (including our own Ecademy) are fairly clunky. As I said above, These needs seem to revolve around three areas:-
- Personal Publishing: one to many communication
- Group Discussion: few to few communication
- Meeting people we don't know: one to one communication in a safe environment

If these needs are real and the YASNs are a real answer to them, then we'll find a way of monetizing it. If we go back a few years this is the same question as asking "How should eGroups/Hotmail make money?". The answer in that case was Yahoo!/Microsoft. And there's hundreds of answers only one of which is to take a skim on transactions. Here's a few.

- Advertising: VC poured scorn on this and continues to do so. And yet Google/Overture have made it work. If you can keep your costs down and sell the advertising cleverly, there's a nice little earner available. Eyeballs *are* worth money. Just not as much as we thought.

- Subscriptions for premium services: The churn may kill you but it does work. At least until the same offer is free elsewhere. Similarly for paid listings.

- Auctioning/selling associated product to corporates: The classic is Meetup selling aggregated customer attendance to venues.

My guess is that the current crop of heavily VC supported YASNs will flame out when they burn all their cash and then either disappear or be absorbed. Mainly because I don't think they can generate as much money as is needed to service the VC they've taken. In the shake out, maybe Barry Diller will buy them all for cents on the dollar. Or a big portal will spend silly money instead of writing and building their own. Which means we'll end up with a couple of large competitors where money is not an issue and a group of niche sites that are self sufficient but remain quite small.

The Decentralizing YASNs postscript.
There is another possibility. Someone will work out how to decentralise all the YASN function into a Movable Type style, free, open source project and there'll be a few million YASNs instead of 100. It might even be nothing more than a plugin for Movable Type/Typepad. This wouldn't kill the existing hosted services but it would reduce their ability to monetize significantly.