Guidelines for validating OPML
For some reason that I'm not really clear on, I have this desire in the back of my head to build a PHP OPML navigator [from: del.icio.us]

Here we go again.

Live from the Steve Jobs Keynote One more thing - Engadget - www.engadget.com : iTunes 6.0 will also feature video and the iTunes Music Store will feature Fairplay DRMed video downloads (big surprise, right?).

At launch over 2,000 music videos will be made available at a cost of $1.99 apiece. You can download iTunes 6.0 starting today.

It's not only music videos you can buy. No, Apple's set up to allow you to purchase TV shows for $1.99 apiece. Get Desperate Housewives or four other ABC shows premiering on iTunes at two bucks an ep. Videos are native QVGA resolution.

A quick google search took me to Isohunt and numerous Bittorrent downloads of Desperate Housewives for free. Who in their right mind would pay Apple $1.99 for these? When they've already been shown free to air.

Then there's the bandwidth issue. So an iTMS music track of 6Mb is $0.99 but a 350Mb video track is $1.99 Did I miss something here?

Just say no to DRM, m'kay?

Qnext > Home
Almost universal networking IM client with added private file sharing and streaming. Wot, no Skype? [from: del.icio.us]

Computerworld > Skype: hazardous to network health?

That was quite a scare story, but it was also full of half truths and downright lies.

Your corporate desktops and notebooks are the peers that are consigned as Skype pleases to relay traffic and function as mini-servers in the Skype universe.

If your PC is directly connected to the net with no intervening firewall then there is a possibility of it becoming a supernode. That eliminates every corporate PC. Have you ever seen a corporate network with no firewall?

According to Skype — and validated by our research — a VoIP call will consume between 24 and 128kbit/s. When a Skype station is functioning as a relay the bandwidth is doubled.

If your PC becomes a supernode, you will relay switching traffic and not voice traffic to an expected maximum of 5kbps, according to Skype staff on the Skype forums. Go ahead and do the tests to prove them wrong.

And, lest you think that you can stop all this by exiting Skype, think again. You might not be using Skype but it might be using you. Skype continues to run in the background unless you uninstall it or kill the process.

If you quit Skype it does not leave anything running on your PC. There's a lot of FUD about how Kazaa was riddled with spyware so Skype must be. Try this. Quit Skype and then look at Task manager. Is anything left running? I don't think so. If Skype did leave anything running, don't you think there would be a completely justified witch hunt against them?

There is an article to be written that digs into Skype's Supernode architecture and it's security but this definitely isn't it. You have to wonder whether this article is a shill for some competing VoIP company or Telco. As a moderately respectable publishing house, IDG should be ashamed. And as for the Tolly Group who apparently did the study and wrote the article, would you trust anything else they wrote?

Cory Doctorow has written a tremendous piece (The Digital Video Broadcasting' Project Content Protection and Copy Management: a stealth attack on consumer rights and competition.) about the work being done in the EU behind closed doors to force you to accept less in the coming digital TV age and to take away basic rights you thought you had. It's a big long piece so I've extracted the main summary points. But even that is hard to get worked up about so here's the management summary.

For 20 years now we've grown used to being able to record an ITV program on Sunday night and watch it on Monday. While watching it, we'll fast forward through the adverts. If our mother missed it, we'll lend her the tape. And for those favourite programs like Black Adder we'll build our own library for a rainy day.

The big media corporations are using the EU to try and make sure we can never do this again and to make it a criminal offence to try. They want the VCR manufacturer to sell you a box that will record ER but not 24; that will stop you lending the result; that will force you to watch the adverts; and will expire your copy of all the Black Adder episodes after 6 months. And crucially, to be able to change the rules after you've bought the box. Last week 24 would record. This week it won't.

In order to do this, they have to lock down every device that might be able to receive or display the TV picture. That includes your computer, your computer monitor, your xbox, your mobile phone, your psp, your portable media player. And that means that every electronic device with a screen will have to be certified CPCM friendly. Even the ones you build yourself. And every operating system whether from MS, Apple, Linux or embedded from Palm or Phoenix will similarly have to prevent anyone from writing software that could circumvent it.

And this isn't just a computing standard, it's proposed to be the law, with criminal consequences if you break it. So bye, bye, general purpose computing.

Now it's pretty hard to know what a private consumer can do about this, but you might start by writing to your elected representative and making it clear that people who take away the right to watch TV how we like it, don't get re-elected.

Anyway here's the bullet points.

Overview:
* DVB creates digital television specifications for use in Europe, Asia, Latin America and Australia
* A DVB project called Content Protection and Copy Management (CPCM) goes beyond the customary work of setting television standards to set out specifications for restricting how television programmes are used after reception
* CPCM represents a grave danger to nations that mandate it as part of their digital television strategies

About DVB, digital television, and the broadcast flag
* CPCM is the DVB's answer to the failed American Broadcast Flag, an attempt to buy the studios' co-operation with the digital TV transition by offering them control over DTV devices
* The studios have no credible new threat from DTV, nor is there any reason to believe that they will avoid DTV in the absence of a CPCM regime
* It is crucial to keep CPCM from being mandated in national laws

CPCM overview
* CPCM's main areas of specification are Usage State Information (complex instructions for restricting use after reception), definitional elements such as "Authorised Domain" (a proxy for one household's worth of devices), and compliance (rules that all manufacturers are required to follow in implementing CPCM)
* CPCM is intended to form the basis of regulatory mandates in Europe, Australia and parts of Asia and Latin America
* CPCM exists to "enable business models" for rightsholders, even if doing so means destroying the business models of some manufacturers

CPCM and copyright
* Copyright has many limitations, exceptions and exemptions that allow the public to make "unauthorised" uses of copyrighted works
* CPCM does not respect copyright: it runs roughshod over the public's rights in the copyright bargain, allowing rightsholders to misappropriate any exemption they desire
* Coupled with a regulatory mandate, this amounts to permission to write private laws to underpin business-models, at the public's expense

CPCM and competition
* CPCM's interoperability with other technologies will be limited by contracts that ensure that no disruptive entrants to the market are permitted
* These licensing regimes limit implementers' freedom to contract with other technology vendors
* Historically, these licensing regimes limit innovation in the industries to which they are applied

CPCM and consumer rights
* It will be impossible to know, a priori, whether a CPCM device will allow you to use it in the way you intend on using it
* Even if a CPCM device does work "out of the box," its functionality can be constrained at a later date by disabling its features or activating USI in programming that limits a desired feature

CPCM and free/open source software
* CPCM's robustness requirement will make it impossible to implement CPCM in free and open source software (FOSS) and hence FOSS programmes will necessarily be precluded from the market if CPCM is mandated into national law
* The right of programmers to publish their work through FOSS regimes is often equivalent to other forms of scientific publishing and is often protected under free speech laws and traditions
* The CPCM robustness regime will therefore stifle free and open source software and the scientific inquiry that relies upon it

The Broadcast Flag, the Broadcasters' Treaty and CPCM
* CPCM is the latest salvo in a global campaign to restrict consumer rights that encompasses US initiatives like the Broadcast Flag and WIPO (UN) initiatives like the Broadcasters' Treaty
* CPCM encompasses many failed US regulatory initiatives and the move to encase it in international treaty obligations will likely be used as leverage to get these initiatives reintroduced in the USA
* CPCM compromises national self-determination by allowing US culture-exporting companies to dictate public policy [from: JB Ecademy]

Here's a question. Is there a service out there that can take a URL and return a list of tags that people have used against that URL? I'm thinking that del.icio.us, technorati and the other tag aggregators could provide this, and a generalised service could call each one and assemble the list.

A kerfluffle of OPML and web directories » Archive » Blog » 0xDECAFBAD : # OPML is a sucky and under-specified format, with implementations subject to approval by one guy.
# OPML is a working format already in use by lots of code, so offer something better or shut up.

Both groups are right. The problem is that standards without implementations are just academic wanking (c Julian Bond, 2003). And implementations without standards won’t get widespread adoption.

What’s intensely irritating is the egos involved who can’t see the truth in the above statement. It should be possible to criticise OPML as a standard while still applauding the experiments and without necessarily offering an alternative. If done with respect, just the criticism on its own should move the debate onwards.

Re OPML based SuperOpenDirectories. It is indeed neat. But I’m still struggling to see the point. Does it just re-invent Gopher? Then there’s the inspired chaos of it all. At least with something like DMOZ, Yahoo, Wikipedia, the hierarchy has some formalised structure and editors (perhaps community editors). An open mesh of decentralised outlines is going to have lots of dead ends and missing cross links. Perhaps that’s just an artifact of the browser Apps we’ve seen so far and the breadcrumb approach being used. Perhaps it doesn’t matter.

And finally, I’d love to see an OPML browser app written in PHP. Perhaps I’ll write one.

Just done a major redesign of the Ecademy site and went live on Friday night. I'm shattered. Damn it's hard doing this stuff on your own even if this time I got quite a bit of help from a web design company.

Still plenty more to do but it's up.

Gosh. Freemasons want to give me money. Will I have my tongue cut out and be buried where my body will be covered by the high tide with bricks in my pockets for publishing this?

The Freemason society of Bournemouth under the jurisdiction of the all Seeing Eye, Master Nicholas Brenner has after series of secret deliberations selected you to be a beneficiary of our 2005 foundation laying grants and also an optional opening at the round table of the Freemason society.

These grants are issued every year around the world in accordance with the objective of the Freemasons as stated by Thomas Paine in 1810 which is to ensure the continuous freedom of man and to enhance mans living conditions. We will also advice that these funds which amount to USD2.5million be used to better the lot of man throughy (sic) our own initiative and also we will go further to inform that the open slot to become a Freemason is optional, you can decline the offer. In order to claim your grant, contact the Grand Lodge Office secretary Steve Wood. Grand Lodge Office Secretary's email: sectofreemason@hotmail.com Richard Smith, PRO Freemason Society of Holdenhurst Road, Bournemouth.

Dave's up to something. Directory And here's the same outline viewed through my directory browser.

But I don't get it. Did he just re-invent Gopher?

Given my use case (finding what you wrote), there's a route here. Standards and services that have taken off really fast in the last few years have some common characteristics. Start with self interest. Whatever it is has to give immediate value back to the person implementing it. Generate additional value from social activity. Feed that back into the self interest. I think this is why many of the solutions that require ubiquity to work, fail. They don't appeal to self interest in the first instance.

So. Let's say our identity metasystems have one component which is the automated equivalent of the AboutMe page at a known URL. We then need to have an HTML representation of some or all of the AboutMe data also at a probably different known URL. We'd then put in a protocol for auto-discovering the Identity URL from the HTML URL. Now we've got something that is of immediate use but with social, viral potential. So the next step is to have a lightweight protocol which is to encourage individuals to put their AboutMe URL into their signature everywhere they post. They get an immediate payback that they have a marker they can search for. All their posts can now be collected using one of the search aggregators (Google, Technorati et al) by searching for the marker. But this also encourages services that make use of the identity metasystems to automatically embed these URLs and to make further use of them. And it provides a route for new types of spider to crawl the emerging data cloud.

I think both LID and OpenID have this type of thing built. I'm not sure about others. We tried to do things like this with FOAF in FOAFnet but got hung up on the problems of working with very large quantities of RDF. One of the bigger issues here is having a common format for typical AboutMe data. The big adoption challenge is to get systems with large numbers of AboutMe pages to automatically embed the Identity URL and support it.

Notice the way this turns Identity systems on their head. Instead of focusing on small numbers of big systems verifying the identity of their users we're building a tool for large numbers of users to provide their identity to lots of systems. Everyone should run their own Personal Identity Provider (PIP). And solving the problem of "what did I write where" is the leverage we can use to make it happen.

This is why I'm passionate about simplicity and support for the bottom end and rant at the high end. I want to get a PIP into every Drupal, phpBB, WordPress, MT, etc installation. And I can't do that in the short term unless the technology requirements are very low.

Approaching a definition of Web 2.0 - The Social Software Weblog : A comment

I'll throw a couple of things into the mix.
- Really simple APIs. Use REST not XMLRPC. Use XMLRPC not SOAP. Use SOAP not the whole WS* stack
- Really Simple Data formats. RSS not your own XML schema.

And driving adoption from self interest first.
- Provide immediate value and wins for individual adoption. Appeal to self interest. eg. Del.icio.us and Flickr users get immediate payback regardles of whether anyone else uses them.
- Leverage Metcalfe's law network effects. Feed social value back into the individuals ROI. eg del.icio.us popular
- Leverage Reed's Law network effects. Feed group forming value back into the social value and hence back into the individual. eg Flickr Groups.

My ranting at Kim Cameron about open source support of Infocards got a mention in Doc's draft here. Sadly it didn't make the cut in the final copy here.

Most of the noisy people in the blogging world have a common problem. And it can be summed up by the question "what did I write and who replied". Our conversations are now fragmented across the web in mailing lists, blog comments, bulletin board forums, IRC, Skype group chats as well as our own blogs. There's now a huge problem in tracking all this stuff and remembering to check if anyone replied or even find the reply when it's on somebody else's blog. We're all developing piecemeal and ineffective strategies to cope by doing things like subscribing to "our name" in aggregators like Technorati and Google Blogsearch.

Allied to this is a need to bring all the writings together in one place so that other people can see who we are. Marc's "Digital Lifestyle aggregator"[1]. Again we're developing independent tools that go a bit further than my personal blogroll or reposting the comment on our blogs. Things like automatically importing flickr, del.icio.us, last.fm data into the sidebars.

Has Identity 2.0 got anything to say about this? Is their some strategy where we can put a positive marker in our scribblings so that automated processes can find them all and bring them all back together? Even a cursory thought about this shows some significant problems to be overcome. Not least of which is identity impersonation.

[1] Which of the big portals is going to turn the "My XXXX" page on it's head and turn it into a "Your XXXX" page. "My XXXX" is so 1998 and all about grabbing sticky eyeballs. It's little more than a bigger and bigger personal menu. It's meant for your eyes only. "Your XXXX" is for other people. It's a bigger and better and more informative AboutMe page. And it's a perfect platform for an Identity Provider.

Originally posted on the Identity Gang mailing list. Comment from Johannes Ernst about LID here.

Tagzania - Tagging the planet

Yet another Social Tagging service. With added Geolocation goodness.

Passel.org - Trac

YAIS - Yet Another Identity System. Worth watching though.

Tim O'Reilly has posted Web2MemeMap on Flickr

Dave Winer says (as you'd expect!) "Note that the thing that's really going, the juggernaut that's powering the growth of the new applications of the web, isn't on the O'Reilly map. Web 2.0 is really simple, it's RSS 2.0."

I think Dave is right but only partially. There is a key thing missing off Tim's map and that's "Simple APIs and Simple Data formats.". All the best work in Web 2.0 is being done with ReST API calls returning very simple XML and often RSS. If there's a choice between ReST, XMLRPC or SOAP, the overwhelming majority of developers drop down to the simplest possible solution and use ReST.

A simple URL parameter based filter or query scheme, returning XML data in RSS is extraordinarily powerful and easy to use.

Which brings me to Amazon and eBay. Please guys, give us RSS as well your more full featured APIs. I really want simple RSS feeds of My Wishlist, My Lists, My Recommendations, My posts on eBay, My Purchases.

Societies worse off "when they have God on their side" : RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.

According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.

The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society.

It compares the social peformance of relatively secular countries, such as Britain, with the US, where the majority believes in a creator rather than the theory of evolution. Many conservative evangelicals in the US consider Darwinism to be a social evil, believing that it inspires atheism and amorality.

Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The benefits of religious belief to a society have been described as its "spiritual capital". But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills.

The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports: "Many Americans agree that their churchgoing nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly sceptical world.

Here's the full PDF.

Gobby Cross platform SubEthaEdit
I can't seem to find out what the networking requirements are. [from: del.icio.us]

Another attempt at the same thing.

One part of the question is whether different expressions of the same idea are worth the same. Should I pay more for a CD than a restricted bandwidth MP3 or a low bandwidth ringtone? The media industry appears to think they are all equally valuable and should be the same price. So what is it they actually own and what is it they are actually selling us?

The gist of the problem is in two parts.

1) Automated recognition of an idea (software, audio, video) even when it is in multiple encodings. eg. How do you tell that a 32Kbps stream, a 192Kb Mp3, an AAC file from iTunes, a FLAC file, a CD WAV, a mobile ringtone are all the same song. Or that a DVD, a DIVX, an AVI, or the same from a handheld camera in a movie theatre is the same video. And worse, that a 10 second sample of that song within a hip hop remix comes from the same idea. The industry has been focussing on watermarking and DRM used as a marker on a specific expression of an idea. But increasingly we transcode that expression (if only to remove the DRM) and in the process remove the marker. Intuitively (and legally), the rights remain the same. It's the same song. But automating that is hard.

2) Separating the trade in rights from the trade in ideas and the expression of those ideas. Analogous to futures and options trading independently from the underlying shares. What if I could buy the rights to listen (or perform or broadcast) to a piece of music separately from obtaining a physical CD or a downloaded Mp3? We could allow P2P file sharing to happen. In fact we would encourage it in order to get free distribution. But there's a big hole when we try and think about enforcement and control of the rights trading.

There's much to think about here. If we solve the recognition problem, we still have to solve the enforcement problem. But I think it puts a new slant on the copyfight.

On a purely personal level, I would like to buy the rights to obtain and listen to about 10-20 new albums a month but without saying where those came from or what format they're actually delivered in and where the rights holder is frequently individuals or independent record labels. And I'd like to be able to transfer some of those rights to my children and to offset the cost by reselling the ones I don't want on eBay or Amazon.

As soon as you start transcoding you open up all sorts of awkward legal questions. I've got a big CD collection which has now all been ripped to MP3. Inevitably my kids listen to it. And as they got laptops some of it migrated onto them. Then they went off to Uni.

Cory pointed me to this Kuro5hin article that proposes an open OSS DVD format for high definition music that is in a copy friendly format. But this is just dragging us back into an argument where some expressions of an idea are worth more than others. I want to move beyond that and ignore the format being used. Either I have the right to listen to the song or not. Either the owner of the rights to that song has the right to sell it to me or not. Once I have that right and a master copy, I should be able to transcode that master copy into whatveer format I see fit and play it on whatever device I see fit.

Still confused here. It makes sense but it still doesn't allow room for a meaningful business model around trading those rights rather than trading specific bit streams or physical expressions.