A few days ago we were talking on IRC about how much RDF and XML there was on the web. We stuck a finger in the air and got 15 Million FOAF and RSS files of structured, machine readable data right now. And its growing at the same rate as the number of Weblogs with spikes as each new major provider joins in.

This prompted a question to which we didn't really have an answer. "What should Google do with RDF/XML/RSS/Atom it finds"?

Then today along comes this mind boggling essay that looks at one possible scenario. August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web

Truly, a mind bomb.

BTW. It's now 2 years since Google introduced their SOAP API. It still doesn't support anything except basic search. There's still no RSS/Atom feed from search, News search, Images, Froogle etc. [from: JB Ecademy]

Download here.

Includes support for Skype-Out to the public phone system. [from: JB Ecademy]

You asked for it. you got it. (You see, I do read the wishlist)

In member search, either full text or on the advanced page, you can now specify "My Network only"

Let me know if you see anything odd (on Ecademy, not in your life, well actually that too). [from: JB Ecademy]

I've been experimenting with techniques to allow people to embed a little bit of Ecademy into their websites. The example below is a first attempt at this. I'd be interested in hearing from people who use it as well as anyone who has any ideas for other things you'd like to see. For instance, a couple of possibilities are a list of the Blog or Club forum titles.

You should probably check out the page on linking to Ecademy as well.

If you want to do this, you'll need some minimal HTML skills and be able to include some HTML in the template or design of your site.

<b>Text</b>
It's the most recently online, N thumbnail photos from your network.

<b>HTML Fragment</b>
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
ecad_id = '1';
ecad_number = '3';
ecad_new = '1';
ecad_sep = '';
//--></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.ecademy.com/ecadnet.js"></script>

Script Notes
- The only required parameter is the ecad_id which is your ecademy #number
- ecad_number. Number of thumbnails to show. Defaults to 5
- ecad_new. Anything except 0 forces a new window for the links. Defaults to off
- ecad_sep. This is appended to each thumbnail+name. Defaults to


Complex example
Displays a horizontal row with the profile glyph at the top

<table width="100%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0">
<tr><td align="center" colspan="4">
<a href="http://www.ecademy.com/account.php?id=123&xref=123" title="View my profile" target="new"><img src="http://www.ecademy.com/images/logos/ecad_80_15a.gif" width="80" height="15" border="0" alt="Ecademy profile"></a>
</td></tr>
<tr><td>
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
ecad_id = '123';
ecad_number = '3';
ecad_new = '1';
ecad_sep = '</td><td valign="bottom">';
//--></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.ecademy.com/ecadnet.js">
</script>
</td></tr></table>

Minimal Example
Displays 5 photos vertically

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
ecad_id = '123';
//--></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.ecademy.com/ecadnet.js"></script>

Example
http://www.voidstar.com
[from: JB Ecademy]

Let's see how many people we can get in.

http://www.ecademy.com/chat.php
or
irc://irc.freenode.net/ecademy


[from: JB Ecademy]

Some of you have been trying http://wap.ecademy.com on your phones and having problems logging in successfully. I think I may have solved this, so please try again.

The problem is that some phones and WAP gateways don't support cookies. And I was using cookies exclusively to maintain the session. I've now switched it so that it uses a URL parameter if cookies aren't supported.

If you don't know about Ecademy on WAP, the details are here. Basically, it's a small subset of Ecademy function available on mobile phones.
[from: JB Ecademy]

If you use a Windows PC, It's Windows Update time again.

One of the patches is for a security hole that looks likely to be exploited in the next 5-10 days, so get patching.

And if you haven't already done it, I'd highly recommend setting Auto-Update so that the updates happen without you haveing to think about it. Right click on "My Computer", Properties, Automatic Update tab. [from: JB Ecademy]

Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka has a table taken from some IBM analysis of disk storage sizes and costs.

This statement was made in 1994

With IBM’s projected rate of increase in areal bit density, of 60 percent per year, for a given price and a given year, one could purchase 1.6 times as much storage capacity the following year. This corresponded to a constant decrease in the price of magnetic storage of 37.5 percent per year.

The good news is that we're right on track. Here's the base figures for simple disk storage (no RAID or redundancy) in US Dollars for 1 Terabyte (1000 Gigabytes)

1992 1,000,000.00
1993 550,000.00
1994 302,500.00
1995 166,375.00
1996 91,506.25
1997 50,328.44
1998 27,680.64
1999 15,224.35
2000 8,373.39
2001 4,605.37
2002 2,532.95
2003 1,393.12
2004 766.22
2005 421.42
2006 231.78
2007 127.48
2008 70.11
2009 38.56
2010 21.21

And it looks like 1Tb of disk will indeed drop below $500 at retail prices by the end of the year.

Now since we'll have no trouble filling all this capacity, it looks to me like "Search" is going to be a dominant technology for the next few years.

I'm also stunned by the reductions in physical size. I saw the disk drive out of a Muvo/mini iPod yesterday. It's about 2.5cm sq and about 5mm thick for 1.5Gb. We're already seeing these in cameras and starting to appear in PDAs. How long before we see them in phones?

[from: JB Ecademy]

I just came across blogthing. It's a free blog system based on Wordpress and funded by Google Ads. Wordpress is highly recommended. [from: JB Ecademy]

Imagine a block in the margin of Joi Ito's weblog. Last update 9:23am. Location: Geneva Airport. Listening: Monkey Radio. Last seen in IRC: Channel #joiito 1m43s ago. Phone: On a call. Last Meeting: Davros. Next meeting: Supernova. Mood:Inspired

What I want is a generic dashboard app that plugs into a weblog margin and does as much as possible of this stuff automatically.

We're all becoming more and more mobile. We're working from laptops, PDAs and advanced mobile phones no matter where we happen to be. We end up borrowing computer time and internet access when we can't get it directly. ("Can I just check my email?").

Next, we're increasingly comfortable with Instant Messaging systems like Skype and Messenger that say that we're "online", or "busy" or "away".

So wouldn't it be neat if these same presence systems could work out and show where we were as well as that we're online. And it would be more neat if this information was available to applications running on our own machines and not just a website or network operator.

Here's some techniques that might be useful.
- GPS. GPS for laptops and PDAs is still a little expensive and it's not built in automatically the way that LAN and Wifi often is. SImilaly it's not yet built in to mobile phones due to size, space, battery life and cost considerations.

- Mobile phone location. The location of Mobile phones is more or less known based on the cell they're connected to and triangulation with multiple cells inrange. It's extremely hard to come up with a generic solution to this. And the network operators hoard this information. Each one has it's own data which makes it hard for a 3rd party to get access to it as you have to do deals with each one separately.

- WiFi. A couple of companies are attempting to build a database of the MAC address of every WiFi access point worldwide with their deployed location. This feels like a boil the ocean solution but might end up being a sort of poor man's GPS.

- IP. If you're internet connected, the IP address can give a rough guide to where you're located. But it's pretty rough and often wildly wrong.

- Human. As a last resort, you could get the human operator to tell you where they are. Except that describing your exact location is pretty hard. Do you know your latitude/longitude position right now? How about the exact Postcode/Zipcode? What about when you're at Cafe Grand Prix? Or in a train somewhere between London and Edinburgh? The most useful answer to that last question is actually "In a train somewhere between London and Edinburgh" and not a geographic answer.

FInally. The moment we open up the idea of including geographic information in presence, other things come to mind as well that could be added. Starting with the old favourite "What I'm listening to". [from: JB Ecademy]

I've got a need for a venue in central London for a gathering of geeks. Can any recommend somewhere?

- 30-40 people
- Reasonably priced food. ie not stupidly expensive
- Sit down or stand up. It doesn't have to be a proper restaurant but it should be real food and not just canape. Some of the people will want to sit and talk
- There's no money for room hire!
- Quiet enough that people can actually talk to each other without spending all evening shouting

I suspect that the last requirement is actually the hardest. [from: JB Ecademy]

The list of blogs on the main site's home page and the list of blog titles now includes entries posted on the other Trusted Networks. This should encourage flow to the other sites. It should also cut down on the number of times that people feel the need to post the same blog on several TNs (please don't do this!).

So when you post a blog, think for a moment if it would be more appropriate on one of the TNs. You'll still get the exposure of appearing on the main site.

The corresponding area on the home page on the TNs and the list of blog titles on the TNs are unchanged.

BTW. I've also fixed the long standing bug that when you were replying to a comment, your photo was on the view of that comment not the author's. [from: JB Ecademy]

Julian Bond wrote:
>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.
>http://www.voidstar.com/foafPerson/

Some changes (and some bug fixing)

1) I've added an array of ifps (inverse functional properties) to each Person. These can be used as keys to identify a Person also referenced elsewhere. mbox is converted to mbox_sha1sum and duplicates are stripped.

2) I've added a single entry "name" to the person array. This uses a heuristic to try and come up with a human readable name for the Person. roughly (in pseudocode).

foaf:name

 else 

foaf:givenname

 else if foaf:surname

foaf:firstName foaf_surname

 else if foaf:family_name

foaf:firstName foaf_family_name

 else

foaf:firstName

 else

foaf:nick

There are times when it's useful to have a value like this without having to run through the whole heuristic in App code.

3) I managed to find an RDF file that had some FOAF in it but it was impossible to work out which was the primaryPerson. The Error handling now deals with this.

4) There are at least two namespace URIs in use for Eric's relationship schema. The code now handles the most recent. http://purl.org/vocab/relationship/ If you're still using the old one, please update your foaf (Marc!). There's a generic RDF problem here to do with namespace versioning.

I've started another attempt (4th!) to write a general aggregator/scutter/smusher using all this. So far it's going better than last time. I do feel like I'm finally getting to grips with FOAF. Most of it is data driven so it's easy to add new namespaces and tags. And there's relatively few special cases to deal with.

The Times Online - T2 has a fun couple of articles on what makes women and men happy. This can be summed up as:-

Men: "Bring beer. Come naked"
Women: "If women are allowed to follow their instincts, they'll be happy. For half an hour."

Most of the stories are based on viewing humans as fundamentally mammals and only really explores this sort of darwinian, biological, mammalian analysis. It can indeed be useful to understand that most of us spend a large amount of time allowing the lizard brain and mammal brain to control us. But it ignores what makes us different from other animals.

We have a human brain that thinks. It's our blessing and our curse.

And I happen to believe that the thinking human brain transcends gender differences. So can we think ourselves into being happy even when our mammal and lizard selves are trying to stop us? [from: JB Ecademy]

Why do people send "Out of office" replies on email? What am I supposed to do with them?

Just another of life's unanswered questions. Like why do Anti-Virus systems send warning messages back when 90% of current viruses spoof the from address?

Please don't do either of these. And especially don't use them if the system can't tell that the target address is a mailing list or that it's sent one to that address already. [from: JB Ecademy]

Skype is rapidly becoming my preferred IM client quite apart from it's voice capabilities. So what would you like to see in Skype?

- Send file during a session
- Web display of presence information via an embedded URL or image in a web page
- An API so people could write add ons
- Store and forward so you could leave a message for a contact who wasn't currently online. The message would be delivered automatically when they came online.
- Better management of the contact list. Import and export via vcards

Now here's the contentious one. With the programmer's experience of Kazaa, it wouldn't be hard to build file sharing of a specific directory between you and the people in your contact list. With some search of the directories of all the people in your contact list then bolted on top. This would end up something like the closed groups in WASTE or Soulseek. It could use the privacy and encrption to hide what was going on. This is the online equivalent of burning a CD for close friends and handing it to them. I've had a quick play with Microsoft's 3 Degrees addon to MSN and with Skype's conference call capability this wouldn't be hard to build in to Skype as well.

What's fascinating about this process is that Skype now have a business model that should bring in revenue. Which means there's no need for them to bundle dubious adware or to litter the user interface with advertising. Skype may be built on voice, but what they've got is actually a general purpose platform that lets them progressively build IM function on top. It's going to be very interesting to see what they do with it. [from: JB Ecademy]

consultationprocess have re-invented The ID Card Consultation document as a blog complete with comments, trackbacks and a permanent URL for each paragraph.

It may or may not make any difference, but feel free to criticise and analyse each individual word. [from: JB Ecademy]

www.mnftiu.cc | get your war on | page thirty-seven

Does this mean we'll be bringing home the troops two days early?

I've now added links to phone numbers in your profile so that when you click on them, it tries to use Skype-Out to make the call. Some hints.

1. In Ecademy format your telephone numbers as +country_code number_without_leading_zero eg
+44 8701 161 161 If you don't people may have to edit the call number after clicking on the link.

2. Get the latest release of Skype 0.98.0.28

3. Pick the Dial tab, click on the link at the bottom and buy some credit

4. Click on Ecademy telephone numbers to connect at cheap rates. eg
EU0.014 per minute UK->USA [from: JB Ecademy]