Long Tail Camp : Long-Tail Camp will start on November 11, 2005 at a location of your choosing. Just show up and start talking about the long-tail of whatever. There might not be a lot of people paying attention or even showing up but hey, it's the long tail, what can you expect? We're certain that Long-Tail Camp will be a huge success and expect it will be over in about 10-12 years, depending on the exact parameters of the distribution...

Beautiful!

Samsung start music download service, Creative aim to beat Apple blah, di, blah.

You know what? Samsung (Like Creative) should stick a finger up at Microsoft, Apple and the Media cartels and Just Say No To DRM.

Imagine for a moment that one of the big manufacturers of personal music/video players opened up and did all the things that the cartels wouldn't like.
- Driverless USB storage with drag and drop
- USB Host so you can swap driect from one player to another
- Format agnostic, Mp3, Ogg, AAC, WMA, WMV, DivX, etc etc etc.
- Open source the firmware and encourage hacking
- Open source plugins for winamp, mplayer, iTunes etc etc Give up on trying to produce yet another music management system
And crucially, promote AllOfMp3 or someone like it.

And then compete with Apple purely on function. Gapless playback, more disk space, better screen, longer battery life, removable batteries, lower prices, etc etc. There's more than enough small annoyances in the iPod to compete against and improve on.

Straight Outta Compton - Done right See also Baby Got Back.
[from: del.icio.us]

If you were ever a member of the Cambridge University Motorcycle Club - CUMCC, please get in touch. We have a mailing list running on Yahoogroups. We've just had a reunion dinner And it's quite likely there'll be another next year. We're particularly looking for people prior to 1975 and crucially anyone who was involved in the late 90s shortly before the club disappeared. Sadly the last Secretary walked off with the club address book and it would be great to find it again.

If you were in the club or know people in the club, drop me a line at julian_bond at voidstar.com or join the mailing list.

Why Does God Hate Amputees? by Marshall Brain

This is an excellent and well argued piece extracted from a much larger book that shows that belief in the little truth of pretty much any religious book is delusional. He uses this to criticise Christians and Christianity, along with Muslims, Jews and Mormons (to take examples). But it's important to understand that he is not criticising those religions per se, but rather the people who profess to be in their number who believe the literal truth of each of their major works.

I have a particular problem with people who call themselves Christians and in particular the American Evangelical kind, who say they believe in the literal truth of the Old Testament. It seems to me that much of the work of the prophet Jesus the Christ and the New Testament over-rode the teachings of the Old Testament. And it's his name which is given to the religion. It's also notable that even the Catholic church is starting to distance itself from a literal reading of the Old Testament and to portray it as teaching stories and parables containing important knowledge but not literally true.

So Marshall Brain has written a great work that debunks one side to most of the great religions that holds vast numbers of people in ignorance, delusion and stupidity. But we shouldn't think that he has debunked religion itself. We'll leave that for another day.

For some time I've been thinking about a book version of Last.FM to try and answer the question "what should I read next" better than Amazon can. It's a source of some irritation to me that Amazon don't this themselves based on what you're reading and have read rather than what you've bought from them. There's something missing in their recommendation system to do with finding people like you as well as books like the ones you've bought. I find their sstem tends to narrow down the niche rather than expanding your reading horizons.

So I've come across Reader2 and I quite like it. It needs work and there's some holes but it's close and close enough to encourage people to use it. So here's my page and my biggest tag, Cyberpunk.

The problem with this is the data entry. Last.fm can tell what you're listening to and it changes all the time. Books can't easily tell a website that their being read and by who. So can someone write a couple of bookmarklets that scrape an Amazon page and fill in the data entry form on Reader2?

Skype could pose security problems News - PC Advisor : Also, as with other P2P applications such as KaaZaa, the connection sharing permitted by Skype makes the the host computer and the network available to others as well, said Robin Bloor, an analyst at Hurwitz & Associates in Waltham. Mass. As a result, "Skype can use a lot of network bandwidth, which may interfere with business applications and services," said Andrea Wuchner-Bruhl, head of global IT security at Novartis Pharma AG, in Basel, Switzerland.

More Skype scare stories with no factual basis. Enough of the FUD already, m'kay?

Supr.c.ilio.us: The Blog : When you invite the whole world to your party, inevitably someone pees in the beer."Free as in beer doesn't sound all that interesting anymore.

Classic. You know Web2.0 has made it when there's a blog devoted to debunking it.

'I will refuse to register for an ID card and will donate £10 to a legal defence fund' - PledgeBank
I've signed the first one so don't to sign again. But if you haven't please do this now. [from: del.icio.us]

blummy - The bookmarklet management bookmarklet
We could do with a metaweb2 control to post to all the services we're using. I'm not sure this it. [from: del.icio.us]

BTW. I claim ownership of the name MetaWeb 2.0

Last weekend we had a re-union dinner for the Cambridge University Motorcycle Club Dinner. A fine drunken time was had by all and we even managed a run on Sunday. Photos here.

But I thought I'd share this device with you.



It's a kit made from riveted ally sheet and 2CV running gear. It's got a massive 25hp but it's very light with soft suspension on 2CV narrow tyres. As it's front wheel drive it's pretty hard to get it to do anything scary. I drove (rode!) it round a field and it was hilarious.

This one will make you laugh as well.


Built in a garden shed. It's Difazio hub centre front suspension, Talbot 1000cc engine (basically a Hillman Imp), Guzzi gearbox.

Here's some blog spam that I'm fighting.

http://lovelyboxing.blogspot.com/2005/10/how-to-make-money-from-people-who-type.html Lovely Boxing: How to Make Money from People Who Type the Wrong Web Address. Vitamin Supplements, Do We Need Them?.

They've played a nasty trick on me. The top right has one of those "Make Poverty History" images. It conveniently overlaps with the blogspot header so you can't flag the blog as bad.

Microsoft Office

Full page colour ad in the The Times today. Middle manager, shirt sleeves, tie, family photo on desk, dying pot plant, IBM flat screen. Strap line "The era of OOPS, I HIT REPLY-ALL" is over". Except that it's part of Microsoft's "Evolve" campaign so the middle manager is a lizard.

So what is MS trying to tell it's core Office customers?

You're a dinosaur!

Yup, that'll help.

Inside Google Sitemaps
More reading needed [from: del.icio.us]

Technorati Search: ecademy

The blog spam problem is spreading. I'm now getting wordpress sites as well as blogspot/blogger sites containing the meta description from Ecademy. And my gut feel is that the rate of new sites appearing is speeding up.

Breaking the Web Wide Open! (complete story) :: AO : But new open standards and protocols are in use, under construction, or being proposed every day, pushing the envelope of where we are right now. Many of these standards are coming from startup companies and small groups of developers, not from the giants. Together with the Open APIs, those new standards will contribute to a new, open infrastructure. Tens of thousands of developers will use and improve this open infrastructure to create new kinds of web-based applications and services, to offer web users a highly personalized online experience.

Marc, this is a tremendous piece of work. If only all white papers were as thorough and so chock full of link love.

Breaking the Web Wide Open! (complete story) :: AO
Excellent summary of the state of the internet as of Summer '05 [from: del.icio.us]

NY Times Meet the lifehacker. Read it quick before it disappears behind the pay wall.

When Mark crunched the data, a picture of 21st-century office work emerged that was, she says, "far worse than I could ever have imagined." Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What's more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task. To perform an office job today, it seems, your attention must skip like a stone across water all day long, touching down only periodically.

So clear some time in your day. Put Skype on DND and turn off all notifications in Skype and any other IM programs. Turn off your email reader or at least turn down the notifications. You don't need to read your email *now*. Turn off your Blackberry and mobile phone. Take the phone off the hook or divert it to voice mail. Put on the noise cancelling headphones. Close that browser with 76 tabs open. Resist the urge to just open your RSS news reader one last time.

It now takes about 15 minutes to get in the zone where you're totally focussed on the job in hand. Don't let anything distract you for the next 1 hour and 45 minutes.

Now go for a short walk round the garden to decompress, make another coffee, turn it all back on again and step back into the firehose. [from: JB Ecademy]

To anyone who thinks Blog Spam isn't a problem take a look at this.

Google Blog Search: ecademy -site:*.ecademy.com

I take an RSS feed from this page to spot anyone who mentions Ecademy in a blog with anything from the ecademy.com domain removed. It's now completely unuseable because somebody has built a robot which is signing up Blogger accounts and using the same text that just happens to include "Ecademy". They're building at least 10 new blog sites per day.

Given that Google own both Google BlogSearch and Blogger this is undeniably their problem. It may also be weblogs.com and the other ping service's problem.

Google Blog search is amazingly fast at indexing new blog pages. It's also now completely useless.

ProgrammableWeb.com : Perhaps the most notable part of the story is towards the end when discussing how Trulia, a for-profit business and not just a hobbyist site, is beginning to run into one of the core mashup issues: data ownership, royalties, and how to share revenue. As their business grows, Google has expressed an interest in sharing.

There's an issue here that is raising it's ugly head.

When an API is provided by a commercial company, to what extent should they be entitled to share in profits generated by a commercial company using it?

My gut feel is "None, No way". If they want to share in the profits they can buy me. And/Or they should share *their* profits with me because I've made their service more valuable.