BBC NEWS | Americas | World 'wants Kerry as president'

A new poll in 35 countries suggests that people around the world would prefer Democratic challenger John Kerry as US president over George W Bush. Global research company GlobeScan Inc and the University of Maryland found clear leads for Mr Kerry among those polled in 30 of the countries.

There's something quite strange going on here. It appears that the world outside America is judging Bush purely on American foreign policy and doesn't like what it sees. Inside America, Americans seem to both like what he's doing on foreign policy and are judging Bush (and Kerry) on something else entirely. The survey was done in July and August so perhaps this is a case of the rest of the world still being in the "Anyone but Bush" camp and they simply haven't seen enough of Kerry to have doubts.

So let's say that Bush is being judged inside America on his domestic policies. Take a look at this fairly superficial analysis "Are You Better Off Now Than You Were Four Years Ago?" Unemployment, Job Creation, the Budget Deficit are all radically worse under Bush than under Clinton and not just a little bit either. If these figures are accurate, then Bush should be really suffering whenever the discussion veers towards domestic policies.

So what are we left with and how can we explain that Bush and Kerry are either neck and neck in the US polls or that Bush has a comfortable lead? The only explanation I have is that Kerry (and the Democratic Party) is losing this election not that Bush is winning it. Because I don't subscribe to the view that Americans are too stupid to see the truth. I'm tempted to say that they are ill-informed, given the superficial and limited views provided by the US media and in particular TV but that's a bit of a cheap shot as well.

There's one more possibility here. And that is that this election is not being fought on rational grounds at all and what we're really seeing is a continuing emotional response to 9-11. It doesn't matter what Bush did or does. It doesn't matter whether it works or not. It doesn't matter whether it makes the world and the US a better place or not. All that matters is that he does something big and brash. And a full scale military invasion of two countries on the other side of the world is nothing if not big and brash. And there's been enough seeds of doubt about Kerry, from his own lips, from Republican spin and from Republican followers, that enough of the electorate thinks he might not have done anything. [from: JB Ecademy]

I was just mousing around while waiting for a massive email delete to finish and came across Derelict London.com via http://www.bloggerheads.com/

The user interface is a bit naff but the pictures are wonderful. I confess that I have a bit of a soft spot for the marginal areas of London and have spent many happy hours wandering around them by bicycle often at odd times of the day and night. [from: JB Ecademy]

As you probably have noticed we changed the way Club Notifications work over the weekend. In response to feedback, I've just uploaded a couple of changes to this. To clarify:-

- The default when joining a club is now Daily

- A Daily message is sent for each club to each member with Daily set for that club when there is at least one message in that club's forum in the last 24 hours.

- Immediate messages are sent to members with Immediate set for that club as soon as a new message is saved. For new threads, the notification goes to all members of the club with Immediate set. For messages within a thread, it goes to people who've posted to the thread and have Immediate set.

If anyone is freaked out by having hundreds of clubs that were set to Immediate and would like them all changed to Daily, drop me a line and I'll do the mass update.

As a user, my approach to this and to blog comment notifications is to create a folder in my email client
for Ecademy notifications. Then I've created a message rule to route anything from noreply@ecademy.com to this folder. For the high volume clubs, I've then clicked on the link in the bottom of every message and changed that one club to daily. I'd strongly recommend doing something similar.

Since the new notifications came in 160 clubs have had at least one message. About 240 have had one message in the last week. If you run a dormant club this is a great opportunity to kick it into life again. [from: JB Ecademy]

0xDECAFBAD Blog has an interesting article today called "Bootstrapping out into open space"

Russell's Unproven Yet Seemingly Obvious Number One Rule For Web Based Services: Don't launch without a way of making money.

This dovetails in nicely with my thinking about hosting, and with FeedReactor. I look at nifty services like del.icio.us, BlogLines, and Flickr, and think, "Hey, I have some good ideas, too. I could possibly put together something like this. But how the !@#$% do those guys pay their hosting bills? Let alone make a living?"

I think the answer is that sometimes you just have to go live with the prototype and see what happens next. A great example of this is Technorati. If they'd thought about what would happen, they'd never have started. The service has been slow and buggy since it began as they walk a knife edge of never having quite enough hardware and bandwidth to satisfy the demand. But the end result was VC and the money to do it properly.

The key here is I think to get yourself into a position where you've got the hosting and bandwidth and so the incremental cost of the next experiment is minimal and then keep chucking the ideas up there as prototypes.

I've also noticed in talking to a couple of startups, that they seem to have way more ideas than they have time or resources to realize. I've seen this in startups I've been involved with as well. I always wanted to get the management and corporate structure into a shape where these ideas could be floated off into separate companies that shared the boring back office infrastructure. But like all startups the day to day fire fighting and development were too time sonsuming to ever think about launching side projects. This was the basis for the business incubators of the dotcom era but the ambitions were always so large that the side projects were hampered by the need to be sure fire winners. Maybe it's time for the few remaining incubators to re-invent themselves as environments for entrepreneurs to "Bootstrap themselves into open space" [from: JB Ecademy]

philgoinginsane.mp3 (audio/mpeg Object) is a voice mail recording of a Brit who isn't happy about the support he's getting.

This is definitely not safe for work. Wear headphones and don't click on the link if you're upset by the F word. [from: JB Ecademy]

Wi-Fi Toys goes to Extremes is a book of cool projects to do with Wifi.

Make antenna cables, build a directional Wi-Fi "cantenna" out of a coffee can, modifying your access point for better signal reception, build an outdoor solar-powered wireless repeater, how to Wi-Fi a TiVo, build a long-haul Wi-Fi link, and how to put together a "dynamic wireless digital picture frame", deploy a car-to-car wireless video link, build a pocket-sized directional antenna out of a couple of paperclips and a flat wooden ice cream cup spoon, Wireless Voice over IP and installing an MP3 player in a car and uploading songs via Wi-Fi

It sounds worth the $24.99 even if most of this is on the web if you're prepared to search for it. [from: JB Ecademy]

at http://www.boris-johnson.com

Also available at
UK Poli Blog via the wonders of RSS.

Hooray! Boris for President! [from: JB Ecademy]

Wikimedia press releases/One million Wikipedia articles (US)/Print - Wikimedia's Meta wiki

Wow! Not bad for a community effort.

It's expected to double again by next spring.

It's in the Alexa top ten. [from: JB Ecademy]

Can anyone recommend a good Banner Ad Agency? I'm looking for an agency:-
- Aimed at Web Banner Ads
- Probably uses Doubleclick for the actual serving
- Can source ads aimed at both UK and international
- Can run multiple campaigns for individual countries and specialist areas
- And as a bonus can provide telesales for in-house served ads. [from: JB Ecademy]

You can file this one under politics rather than business or social and slap my wrist for posting it on Ecademy. But I feel too strongly about the implications to let it lie.

Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | Iraq had no WMD: the final verdict : The comprehensive 15-month search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has concluded that the only chemical or biological agents that Saddam Hussein's regime was working on before last year's invasion were small quantities of poisons, most likely for use in assassinations.

A draft of the Iraq Survey Group's final report circulating in Washington found no sign of the alleged illegal stockpiles that the US and Britain presented as the justification for going to war, nor did it find any evidence of efforts to reconstitute Iraq's nuclear weapons programme.

As Sean Bonner writes.

So the official word is that after 15 months of searching that there were NO WMD in Iraq. Not some - NONE. However, W had this to say about the findings:

President George Bush now admits that stockpiles have not been found in Iraq but claimed as recently as Thursday that "Saddam Hussein had the capability of making weapons, and he could have passed that capability on to the enemy".

Is it just me or is that a *really* scary statement?

That's like arresting someone for possession of drugs, then not finding any drugs and saying "well hell, they have seen people selling drugs on the streets so they knew how to get drugs and might have told other people how to get drugs." So just having information is bad now. Even if you are clearly not doing anything with it.

Then we have this in the Guardian report.

The motives for war, meanwhile, came under fresh scrutiny last night as the Telegraph reported that Tony Blair was warned in Foreign Office papers a year before the invasion of the scale of dealing with a post-Saddam Iraq. ... if authenticated, the papers "demonstrate that the government agreed with the Bush administration on regime change in Iraq more than a year before military action was taken".

And meanwhile in the UK our attention is distracted by arguing whether some country folk should be prevented from getting their rocks off with the adrenalin fix of riding horses flat out in pursuit of an animal that they rarely catch. And a little scuffle in Parliament Square is presented as "The defining moment in the Blair parliament" conveniently forgetting the millions who marched peacefully against the war in all the major cities last year and the year before. (As an aside, the whole fox hunting thing is a complete red herring. It's a sop to a section of the Labour party that wants to engage in class war and town vs country war. The bill has been so badly drafted that it hasn't a hope in hell of ever becoming law. And it gives Blunkett an excuse to propose yet more civil surveillance. CCTV cameras in trees covering the countryside? Come on. Don't make me larf!)

So come on people.

We've been lied to.

Consistently.

And persistently.

So what are we going to do about it?

Vote them in again so they can lie to us some more because the alternatives aren't any better?

Just to get right up everyone's nose I'm going to quote in full another blog post I saw yesterday.

1. The War on Terror is a lie that will not protect you from terrorists
2. The War on Terror is being used to curb civil liberties and human rights
3. The War on Terror has been used by the Bush administration to justify torture
4. Including the torture of people who aren't terrorists
5. One day, it will be you with a bag on your head, and you'll wonder how it all came to be

A Plea To Americans

You came in rather late, but thanks for saving our asses in WW1.

Again with the lateness, but you did it again in WW2. It's appreciated.

Now, if it's not too much trouble, we need you to save us from WW3.

It's going to take more than your vote. You also have to reach out to the people around you and show them what's really going on. And it's not going to be easy.

Attached to this is a link to a short Flash piece that is required viewing. "A funny thing happened on the way to Abu Ghraib"

Still, mustn't grumble. It's all a long way away. And pales into insignificance compared with the problems of finding decent schooling for your children, getting to work on public transport safely or dealing with the "menace" of binge drinking by teenagers in provincial towns.
[from: JB Ecademy]

Interesting article from Simon Barnes this week in The Times in the run up to the Ryder cup. The gist is to ask how the USA might have been different socially if the national sports were ones that the rest of the world played and hence intenational matches on foreign soil were as important in the USA as they are in say Brazil or India.

"The reason Americans have never got international sport is because they never play any. Or hardly any. The sporting focus of the nation has always been internal, self- enclosed, all-repelling. The high points are the Super Bowl, the National Basketball Association finals and the World Series, an event so exotic it sometimes includes Canada. They don't have Test matches. They don't have World Cup qualifying matches well, they do, but nobody notices. They don't have the Six Nations rugby championship. They don't get beaten by New Zealand or Norway or Ireland. They don't get whitewashed or blackwashed, they don't get bamboozled by India or out-tigered by Pakistan.

Try watching the Olympic Games in the US. Or rather, don't, not if you want to watch the Olympics as we understand them, a sporting event involving around 200 nations. In the US there are two nations: America and America's opponents."

And you wonder if the country's entire conception of itself would be different if it hadn't invented its own games: if Americans had carried on playing cricket, if they had adopted proper football as a national pastime, if they beat and got beaten by teams from other nations on a regular basis, if the notion of international sport, of regular dealings with people who talked different and played different and lived different, were part of national life, if sport were a celebration of diversity; above all, if sport were a revelation of national weaknesses as well as of national strengths.

You can't help but wonder that if this were the case, not only would American sporting life be vastly different, but American social and political life as well. [from: JB Ecademy]

Let's not get into it's versus its or using apostrophe s on proper nouns when you mean plural rather than the possessive.

Today's irritation is the use of loose when what you mean is lose.

Is it just me noticing it or is this on the ascendance? Are we witnessing the birth of a new spelling (a neologism even)? Or are the authors simply not championship spelling bee material?

Here's an example. His primary assertion is that Rathergates will force unbundling because one bad item leads media consumers [to] loose trust in the whole.. Are media consumers unleashing trust in the whole? Are they setting trust free to chase the dogs of war? I can excuse the missing "to" as the sort of mistake we all make when typing too fast and hitting submit without re-reading the text. But the mis-spelling of lose appears to be deliberate. [from: JB Ecademy]

For all those weboptimiser people. It looks like Google Ads is incredibly fast at working out what's on the page. Are pages containing Google Ads indexed faster than normal? I don't think they're scanning the page in real time but it feels like there's a short link between a page request containing a Google Ad and that page getting into the index so that next time the Ad is better targeted.

The other question is whether putting Google Ads on a page tends to increase that page's page rank. [from: JB Ecademy]

See Marc's Voice: Sell Side advertising (OpenListings?)

I went to a dinner last night with a bunch of interesting people at which Marc Canter presented this idea. I'm both fascinated and bothered by it.

The gist is this.

On one side there's a bunch of sites (like Ecademy and CraigsList) that have listings of stuff people want to sell. There's also a bunch of people who have personal sites and blogs who have stuff to sell who currently use places like Ebay.

On the other side is a very large number of small and large sites that would like to advertise stuff that people had to sell and earn some money from it.

What if there was a standard like RSS for publishing your adverts for stuff. And sample code in lots of platforms to display that stuff. We could disintermediate Google and Adsense.

Except (comma but), there has to be some aggregator in the middle who manages the charging and payment, tracks who gets what and who clicks on what and serves up the right ads to the right people. But what if there was open source code and a standard protocol and API so that anyone could run an AdServer. But then we hit the problem of critical mass. The publishers want to work with AdServers with lots of the right sort of inventory. The displaying websites want to work with AdServers that have lots of the right sort of Ads. And we're back where we started with the Ad industry pre-Google.

In fact, if you look at this, it actually looks like a reaction to a couple of missing pieces and flaws in Google's program.

First, Google has a real problem at the moment that it's too good. If you're in business and describe your products well, Google will accurately target your domain and serve up loads of ads for your competitors. They have to find a way of dealing with this.

Second, listings sites don't really have a mechanism for automatically creating Google Ads from their listings. And if they did, they probably couldn't afford it (or maybe they could). But this is where Marc's idea might work. The listings sites could act as Google's resellers. The trick would be for Google to provide a simple API and to keep the cost low. I figure Ecademy, for instance could charge for listings at a rate that included the payment to Google with the USP that every listing got widespread exposure on Google's huge roster of display sites. As a by product benefit to Ecademy, every click through would be take you to Ecademy where the listing is actually hosted and of course, we would make it hard to respond to the listing without signing up to us first.

So as usual the question becomes, "What should Google Do". Adding an API to AdSense to allow automatic posting of "adverts for stuff" with a standard data description format could revolutionise the supply side of advertising just as AdSense has revolutionised the display side. Will they do it?

At which point, I start thinking about independent AdServers again and in particular BlogAds. And the old Blogger TextAds program. If an AdServer site can aggregate enough inventory, handle tracking and payment, do the sort of automatic serving that Google and Overture do and innovate with the API, they could not exactly compete with Google but make a good living from the space between individuals, listing sites and web inventory owners along side them. And in the process take big bites out of the "boot sale/local newspaper classifieds" market currently served by Ebay.

Anyone got some VC? (or spare programming time in the evenings?) [from: JB Ecademy]

SSRN-War, Peace, or Stalemate: Wargames, Wardialing, Wardriving, and the Emerging Market for Hacker Ethics by Patrick Ryan

A quite detailed and legal minded paper. Note that it's written from a US perspective and so doesn't allow for UK and EU laws.

"This article will argue that the act of wardriving itself is quite innocuous, legal, and can even be quite beneficial to society. It will also highlight the need for wardrivers - and for anyone accessing open networks - to help establish and adhere to strict ethical guidelines." [from: JB Ecademy]

We should not have allowed 19 murders to change our world - Robert Fisk: 11 September 2004

Three years ago, it was all about Osama bin Laden and al-Qa’ida; then, at about the time of the Enron scandal ­ and I have a New York professor to thank for spotting the switching point ­ it was Saddam and weapons of mass destruction and 45 minutes and human rights abuses in Iraq and, well, the rest is history. And now, at last, the Americans admit that vast areas of Iraq are outside government control. We are going to have to "liberate" them, all over again. ...

... George Bush and Tony Blair are doing their best to make sure the murderers DO change our world. And that is why we are in Iraq.

As seen on Bloggerheads who has this to say.

Today, you should spare a thought for the victims. All of them. By my reckoning, there's about 90,000 dead (and a few million besides 'merely' suffering) because of the way this unique mix of tragedy and spectacle has been ruthlessly exploited by the Bush administration in the pursuit of power and profit.

I weep for the world.

A few people have asked for a way of getting messages from Private Clubs in the RSS feed for My Clubs. So now you can.

Add &pword=YourEcademyPassword to the end of the URL for the RSS. If the uid and pword match, you get to see the messages from all the clubs that uid belongs to including the private ones.

The same trick can be used to export all your profile data, including sensitive contact info, via FOAF. But there's probably only 3 people in the world who might want to do that at the moment. More on that story later... [from: JB Ecademy]

Last night in the Marriott Marble Arch I stupidly got stung by STSN for their WiFi. Here's the catalogue of shame.

Marriott have outsourced their WiFi access to STSN. There's nobody in the hotel who understands it and the only detail is a single photocopied sheet behind the reception desk althought there was a 5 foot sign in the bar advertising it.

When I first tried to connect I got endless captive portal errors that always ended with a 404 page not found error.

So I eventually found a support telephone number on one of the signs. This turned out to be a premium rate number to a call centre in the USA. After running round the usual useless menus and stock responses followed by call waiting music, I finally got to an operator, explained the problem and then was cut off. That support call cost me £8.00.

A few minutes later I went back to the WiFi and got through to the credit card entry screen which I think was IE6 only. This got me online with a popup window that had the logoff button on it. There was no indication that I had to logoff to kill the session, only that if I didn't I wouldn't get an email confirmation of the cost.

With the bar full, the wifi was seriously flaky despite apparently having good signal. Somewhere in there and what with suspending the laptop to wander up to the meeting, back to the bar and rebooting the laptop once, the popup window was lost. I got into conversation with a couple of people so it was 25 minutes later that I found out I was still on line.

I thought I'd better make sure I was logged out so I went to the STSN site and despite lots of FAQs about configuring WiFi on XP, there was nothing about killing the session. By chance I managed to find the popup window URL in the browser history. Sure enough I was still logged on so I did a final email collect and logged off. Imagine my surprise when I saw the bill.

£27.25 for 88 minutes online!

This surely plumbs new depths for ripping off customers. Given the prices in the bar as well, clearly London Marriotts are designed to fleece expense account travellers unmercifully. But frankly given the hoops I had to jump through, I wonder what I would have been charged if I hadn't found the logout button. I've got no reason to believe that I wouldn't still be racking up credit card charges.

Ironically while sitting in the bar I could just get signal from a free, unprotected WiFi AP somewhere across the street but not good enough to use.

One further thought. I've had problems before with commercial WiFi that has a signup page. It's often IE6 only and not browser neutral. It often involves a popup page when we all now block popups. If you lose the popup page there's frequently no obvious way to get it back. If you don't log off, it often takes a considerable time to time out and log you off automatically during which you're still paying. It's often stupidly hard to find a support number, get through to support, find how to logoff and there's only very rarely anyone on site who can help.

And they expect to make a long term business from this?
[from: JB Ecademy]

I've just come across a niche business idea that needs to exist. Currently premium rate telephone numbers are arranged with each national PTT. This means that it's impossible to have a single number that can be called internationally and it's extremely expensive to set up numbers in each country that your users might want to call from. What is needed is for an organisation (Like Skype or Vonage, say or the cheap rate calling card companies) that already have infrastructure in each country to provide a system where they resell international premium rate numbers to service providers. Then an international company like Ecademy could go to a single place to arrange a premium rate number that worked everywhere.

The alternative is for the national PTTs and TelCos to work out cross charging but I don't hold out any hope of this happening, given how slow they've been with cross border SMS and MMS. [from: JB Ecademy]

I think I've finally got the comments threading working correctly in "Threaded-Max" view. It only took 2 years.

For those who don't know, above the comments on a blog is a comments display control box. The options work like this.

Display:
- List-Min: Just show titles in date order
- List-Max: Show full text (according to threshold values) in date order
- Thead-Min: Titles only in threaded order
- Thread-Max: Show full text (according to threshold values) in threaded order

Order:
For the List displays only
- Date-Old: oldest first
- Date-New: Newest first
- Rate-High: Highest rated comments first
- Rate-Low: Lowest rated comments first

Filter:
Each comment has a -1 to +5 rating in a drop down box. Comments start with 1 point. Set the drop down values and click on Moderate comments button at the bottom to show your approval or disgust at the individual comments. The end result is that the comments get a current score and an average value.

The Filter setting decides the value at which comments get collapsed into a title only and obviously only applies if you have a display setting of List-Max or Threaded-Max. So if you set it to +1 any comment with a current score of less than +1 will be collapsed.

The default view is now Threaded-Max, Date-Old, +1

I'd encourage you all to rate comments particularly on blogs that attract long threads. If we all do this, then the worst comments will tend to fade into the background. [from: JB Ecademy]