Custom Scooter Girls Team!
Awesome collection of photos of customised megascooters owned by Japanese girls. [from: del.icio.us]

In Microsoft Netscape Doc Searls comments on Microsoft's plans for the web and the portrayal of this as a "war" with Netscape by the media.

Except that it's 1995. How naive we were then. How innocent.

What struck me as I read it was how few of the links in the document still work. Damn linkrot! Now think about an equivalent document being writen and posted on the web now. How many of the links will still work in 2015?

About a month ago, we started taking the first paragraph of people's postings in Profiles, Blogs, Marketplace entries and elsewhere and putting it into the page description. We also started or confirmed that Ecademy was "pinging" the various blog update services. The end result is that Google is paying much more attention to us and the page description in Google results reflects the first few lines of the body text. This has some implications:-

1) Pay attention to the title and first sentence of your Profile, Blogs and Marketplace entries. This has a big effect on how easy the post is to find in Google and the description when it has been found.

2) The beta Google Blogsearch is indexing Ecademy blogs and Marketplace extremely quickly. A new post typically appears in the Blogsearch within an hour. It's not clear yet whether Google routes this through to the main index as well but I rather think they do now.

Technically, what we do is to strip HTML tags from the body text of the entry, we then convert newlines to spaces, finally we take the first 180 characters broken at a word boundary and put the results into the Meta Description tag at the top of the page. So I'll stress this again. Think carefully about the first sentence and paragraph of your posts and profile.

The ping service "pings" a collection of services each 15 minutes if there are any new posts. We're currently pinging Weblogs.com, Pingomatic, Technorati and Blo.gs This is belt and braces but ensures we come to the attention of most of the major search and aggregation engines. [from: JB Ecademy]

Good analysis that rips Sony a new one. Sony DRM is worse than you might think : "Sony compromised your system and will not directly allow you to remove it without compromising your privacy. It also will not replace your defective CDs with non-infected ones. If you hose your computer or network with this infection, and want to play your music, do not pass go, do not collect $200."

You might want to look here. The UK company that supplied the DRM software.

info@first4internet.co.uk
sales@first4internet.co.uk
webmaster@first4internet.co.uk
By Phone
Tel: +44 (0)1295 255777
Fax: +44 (0)1295 262682

By Post
6 South Bar Street
Banbury
Oxfordshire
OX16 9AA
United Kingdom

Management Team
Nick Bingham Chairman
Mathew Gilliat-Smith CEO
Tony Miles Operations & Technical Director
Peter Worrall Marketing & Research Director
Nick Drew ICA Business Development Manager

Anyway, yet another reason not to buy Sony products.

Cool! Yahoo! Maps Web Services - Geocoding API Convert any address to Lat/Long.

USA Only. Oh Pants! How can anyone release a maps system that is USA only! SO I thought I'd try http://maps.yahoo.co.uk/beta/#trf=0 but that redirects to a German page. "Yahoo! Deutschland - Seite nicht gefunden"

Come on guys.

Dave says, Let's make the Google API an open standard. Actually let's not. Let's push Google and the other search engines to do a very similar API in ReST and in XMLRPC. Who needs SOAP? And the API itself could do with some simplification. And while we're at it let's push Google and the others to put APIs on their other services like Image Search, News Search, Blog Search, Comparison shopping (Froogle), Maps, Mail, etc, etc, etc. And let's not forget that most of these services need RSS witha simple ReST interface as well. And while I'm grumbling, that goes for Amazon and eBay too.

Which raises the big problem with Google right now. Why don't they ever finish anything? They launch some really neat stuff but so much of it hardly ever gets any more attention and rarely gets changed. Microsoft has forgotten how to ship early and ship often. But arguably Google still hasn't learnt this one.

The Big Picture: DRM Crippled CD: A bizarre tale in 4 parts : Variety writes that "the new copy protection scheme which makes it difficult to rip CDs and listen to them with an iPod is designed to put pressure on Apple to open the iPod to other music services, rather than making it dependent on the iTunes Music Store for downloads."

It's DRM day today. Ludicrous as this entire story is, let's not forget that Apple is also guilty here for whatever reasons; by using DRM to manipulate the market and protect their position as an exclusive distributor of music to iPod owners.

Mark's Sysinternals Blog: Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far

Oh good grief. Sony uses rootkit techniques to install DRM off copy protected CDs with no warning to the user and no uninstall mechanism.

Just Say No To DRM, m'kay?

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.