We will be taking Ecademy down at 18:00 tonight (Friday June 30) for planned maintenance to our hardware. We estimate the site will be down for about an hour.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused. [from: JB Ecademy]

Phil Wolff on SkypeJournal asks Skype Journal: Should eBay and Skype be open to other payment systems? : Now that eBay is letting sellers put Skype Me links in their auctions and profiles, shouldn't they also encourage use of rival tools?

It's surprising to me that eBay don't provide more tools to build an AboutMe profile page for users of their system. I guess at one time they were concerned about people using eBay purely as a tool for finding products and then taking the transaction offline. And it would interfere some with their rating/reputation system. But now they are beginning to open up, it's time to open up properly.

Then there's the issue of a common sign in system. It ought to be possible to sign in with a common login to eBay, Paypal, Skype. It's the same problem Google is currently tackling and MS have tried to tackle in the past with passport and in the future with Infocards. eBay's vast number of accounts in the three systems now give them the opportunity to play in the Identity Server space as well.

And so to numbers. "The combined users bases of Yahoo! Messenger, AOL, Google Talk, QQ, MSN, and Live Messenger dwarf Skype" Is this true and to what extent? I *think* Skype has overtaken YM! and is closing in on AOL and MSN. It's a small sample with a skewed audience but this poll puts Skype at 45%, MSN at 30% and the others nowhere.

I seem to be waiting in vain for MSN Messenger and YM! to interoperate with chat, voice and video. And for LibJingle to bring voice and video interop between iChat, AIM, GoogleTalk, Jabber, Trillian and Gaim. Meanwhile Skype continues to churn out a new release every 2 months and bug fixes every 2 weeks.

Google Account Authentication

So they did it. I've been waiting for this for ages. There is a catch of course. All your data are belong to Google. What's missing here is the ability for third party ID servers to use the same protocol and to federate among themselves. But it should be possible for people to reverse engineer it and create that.

Now when will Google allow you to merge all the different identities you have so that it recognises that they all belong to the same person? I think I've got about 10 Google accounts now. It's extremely annoying when I'm logged into one because I was using Google Analytics and I then want to check the Calendar that is associated with the gmail/googletalk account.

I wonder how long it will be before Drupal can use this to login and create accounts?

I've just seen a very curious letter on P2Pnet about Kazaa and Sharman Networks.

Contents below.

Hi Jon,

I'm the guy who arrogantly claimed that Sharman Networks implemented on December 5, 2005 an idea I sent them, which they were clueless of, to block Australians from using Kazaa. That last minute move by Sharman allowed it to continue operating Kazaa from that date until today instead of following an Australian court order which ruled that Sharman must either close down its business or implement a content filtering solution (which basically is the same as closing the business).

You can refresh your memory here:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/breaking/sharman-denies-lawyers-claim/2005/12/08/1133829710467.html

I'm telling you this because Sharman's attitude towards me, as well as in general, led me to take unreasonable and irresponsible actions including the claims I make below.

That is the reason why I now wholeheartedly want to claim that:
1. I am the person who posted in Israel the comments on p2pnet stories 8678 and 8699 which led Sharman to sue you (together with the Doe and Roe families).
2. You, Jon Newton, did not collaborate with me in any manner in posting the comments and you had no advance notice of the posts.
3. The opinions stated in those comments were genuine and the info was provided by a third party which is related to the Roes.

Now that we got that out of the way, to me it seems absolutely amazing that a P2P company which is fighting for its life in a court of law sues and tries to take down a site that has the explicit mission to advance the sharing of information and data which is really all what P2P is about. In the name of whatever is decent I think that Sharman must retract the case altogether and of course against you because it is obvious that you had nothing to do with the comments.

It's not that I don't feel compassion for Sharman's situation as I too now claim to have suffered after being publicly ridiculed with false and defamatory expressions in front of my family, friends and anyone else who read the link above. Reading about Sharman's agony over the posts reminded me of those long nights in which I woke up screaming my lungs out "screw loose? screw loose? Screw loose!" only to return to a vegetative state until the next psychotic outburst. Oh, the horror, the pain, the damages.

Compassion aside, too often do corporations and individuals with power or money decide that the end justifies the means although that sort of attitude should be reserved, if at all, for the weak.
When Sharman wants to save face or avoid answering questions it feels free to discredit with outright defamation a person who obviously had good intentions with respect to it. And when it wants to reveal the identity of an anonymous person Sharman suddenly becomes sensitive to the written word and assigns a famous defamation lawyer to the case which, if successful, can only mean bad news for free speech and the community Sharman regards as customers.

Anyway, it's worth mentioning that this entire letter, if read by anyone, is unsolicited advice and text and should be viewed accordingly, nothing above should be seen as a solicitation of legal proceedings or may be used in a court of law. Such proceedings shall be initiated, if at all, on the risk of the plaintiffs alone and I reserve all rights and claims I am provided with according to any law, including my right to, with all due respect, reject the jurisdiction of Canada's courts, the right to defend against and discredit the entire claim as well as to set off and counterclaim with at least two claims of my own I believe I have against Sharman Networks.
Also, if the legal proceedings against you shall continue I offer to legally assign to you all rights and claims I may have against Sharman Networks including with respect to an unjust enrichment claim and the defamatory expressions used against me, if in the opinion of your lawyers this may help.

It's not too late to kiss and make up.

Thank you for the great work you do here and for your stand on the right side of free speech,

Cheers :-)

Itai Leshem
Tel-Aviv, Israel
ileshem@gmail.com

Well, well. Perhaps this will take some of the heat off Jon.

bOing bOing has an article here about people creating podcasts from the MP3s put out by a US public service broadcaster.

Two things of note.

- Creating web links to people's content is good. But creating a podcast of links to other people's rich media content is a bit mean, no matter how much benefit is added. and the reason is

- We still don't have a good answer to the podcast hosting bandwidth problem. And it's made worse because RSS feeds often get left in an RSS reader long after you've stopped reading them. And with a podcast, the reader will download all those enclosures regardless of whether they get used.

So we have an NPR station generously providing Mp3s of it's content. People turn these into a podcast. Subscribers then download loads of copies and don't listen to them. And the NPR station's bandwidth bill goes through the roof.

One possible solution to this is real integration of BitTorrent into podcast aware RSS readers. This was obvious from when Podcasting hit the headlines. But it feels like we're still waiting for all the pieces to get put in place. And not least is a user friendly system that can take all the pain out of posting a new entry with it's enclosure that automatically and painlessly creates and seeds the associated torrent.

Naymz: Home Page
Commercial AboutMe page. At last. [from: del.icio.us]

Share Skype - Building A Skype BOT
C# source [from: del.icio.us]

I've been tracking the use of Firefox on Ecademy. I've just seen a really dramatic acceleration in the last few weeks. For June so far the figures look like this.

Name Visits Percentage
1. Internet Explorer 83,445 69.76%
2. Firefox 30,419 25.43%
3. Safari 3,639 3.04%

This is the first time I've seen Firefox over 25% and IE below 70%. Maybe it's a statistical anomaly but it surely looks to me like IE use is now in free fall.

This has interesting implications for systems like Alexa that are IE only. Or sites and developers that use technologies like ActiveX that are IE only. [from: JB Ecademy]

I've given up trying to rate my music or organise it into playlists. With > 70Gb now, it's just too much like hard work. But the random shuffle functions in Winamp and my Creative Zen just aren't good enough. So, Lazyweb, here's what I want.

A Winamp plugin that makes it easy to just say "Play any track" and launches a random shuffle of the entire collection. I then want three big buttons in the style of Last.FM "Love, Skip, Ban". When I hit these it should automatically feed back into the random shuffle algorithm. Love tracks should get higher priority. Skip tracks get skipped and get moved down the priority. Ban tracks get moved to the bottom of the heap and get played almost (but not quite) never. The system should remember what I've listened to between sessions and try to cover the whole collection over months. It should give priority to tracks I've recently added to the collection.

Ideally I should have exactly the same functions on my personal media player. And when I plug it in it should swap statistics with the desktop system.

As an aside. My Creative Zen Xtra has had an 80Gb hard disk added. At the moment I've got a complete copy of the main collection on the player. I switched to PFS-MTP MS Windows firmware whihc was a mixed blessing. It's made drag and drop possible (although not as a USB Mass storage device). But 'm desperate for a way to better integrate it into Winamp. There is a plug in but it can't yet play music off the player through Winamp.

Where should I get my music?

Do I use the P2P nets where nobody gets paid and I run a small risk of being found out?

Do I buy my music from a bunch of Russians at AllOfMp3.com who may not be paying anyone. Or at least nobody involved in producing music.

Do I buy from iTunes where many artists report that they're seeing $0.07 or less from the sale of their music on the iTunes Store, so all your money is doing is lining the pockets of the same recording companies that are busily suing grannies, little kids and everyone else they can get their hands on And of course merely paying off the advance they received from those same people.

We had a brief outage this evening.

Our servers are hosted in a Globix facility. Their main and backup A/C chillers for the main datacentre room failed. Shortly after that their main routers handling the pipes to the outside world shut down as they overheated. This took out every customer hosted at that site and quite a number of them had to shut down their whole operations until the A/C came back up, to avoid overheating. We were comparatively lucky and our servers kept going and came back online as soon as the network was restored.

I understand there were a lot of rather unhappy engineers queuing up to get the keys to their racks. [from: JB Ecademy]

The Skypecast of the Ecademy event is running now 19:30 BST.

Details of the Skypecast can be found here.
https://skypecasts.skype.com/skypecasts/skypecast/detailed.html?id_talk=9403

To listen in you need a copy of Skype, preferably the latest Beta. [from: JB Ecademy]

We're going to attempt to Skypecast the Ecademy event this evening starting at 19:30 BST.

Details of the Skypecast can be found here.
https://skypecasts.skype.com/skypecasts/skypecast/detailed.html?id_talk=9403

To listen in you need a copy of Skype, preferably the latest Beta. [from: JB Ecademy]

In the last couple of weeks we've started getting a weird support problem. A few people seem to be unable to save their profile or to save blogs. What happens is that they wait for 60 seconds or so and the browser then comes back with 400 Bad Request.

Now I haven't done anything likely to make this happen. And a 400 Bad Request should be pretty much impossible because it's the Server saying "I couldn't understand what the Browser told me." These are bog standard POST forms with nothing unusual about them. It's very hard to see how a browser could screw them up and send bad data back. And it's clearly only happening to a few people.

My gut feel is that this is either an IE6 update that's gone wrong. Or it's a browser add on such as Google Web Accelerator screwing up[1]. Or it's an ISP transparent proxy that is failing to pass data back correctly. I think it's IE6 only, but I'm not even sure of that. I haven't yet been able to find any common pattern to the people with the problem.

Any ideas? Because I've run out of them and I'm not sure what to look for next.

[1]Incidentally, Google Web Accelerator seems to be broken. It frequently returns a link to a RedHat Linux Apache initial installation screen rather than the target website. I have no idea where it's getting *that* from. [from: JB Ecademy]

And I'm pleased to say that after all that Cory isn't too busy to offer an opinion on the great Web two point oh trademark debacle. Boing Boing: Can anyone own "Web 2.0?"

What I don't get is why messrs Canter and Winer felt the need to goad him into it. I'm sure there's more to this than meets the eye and thinking that it was petty spite by them is almost certainly unfair to those two fine gentlemen.

Whenever I see some example of hubristic excess I ask myself:-

What would Cory say about this?

And then I ask myself

Why hasn't Cory said anything about this yet?

And then I realise,

He's probably busy.

If we can't use Web two point oh, I vote for Web 0.92

We have had an outage from about 5am to about 10am this morning.

It looks like the problem was with our main datacentre and connectivity provider Globix. We're currently working with them to try and track down exactly what happened.

Apologies for the inconvenience caused. [from: JB Ecademy]

Sharman Networks End User License Agreement for Images

Sharman Networks does not object to third party use of images in media publications, or on World Wide Web pages, so long as the use is not disparaging and provided you adhere to the following additional guidelines which may be amended from time to time.

For All Uses of Images:

This image is only available for the members of the media for use in media publications. It is not for distribution.

Credit for this image must be given to:

Belinda Mason-Lovering of Mason-Lovering Photographers

You may not disparage Sharman Networks or any of its products in your use of this image.
You should not use our images, photos, application(s), corporate name, logos, screen shots or other copyrighted material in a way that would indicate Sharman Networks' sponsorship, affiliation or endorsement of Your Product(s) or Service(s).
This image can only be used as is, and as provided by Sharman Networks, you may not alter the screen image in any way. The image must appear precisely as is does on this site.
Sharman Networks must be notified of all usage different to this EULA.

NB: If your use falls within these guidelines, no further written permission will be required and will not be forthcoming. If you need assistance interpreting these guidelines, please seek the advice of your own copyright attorney

So, saying something disparaging here about free speech, censorship or a P2P company bringing a libel suit against a website that promotes P2P would be absolutely wrong and I won't even consider it.

Actually I think she's quite a babe. Schwing!

Help Jon beat the lawsuit

The next stage in my Google Maps experiments has just gone live. We're now plotting all Ecademy subscribers on a Google Map using my automated bunching code. I think we're the first social or business network to do something like this.

If anyone's worried about data security, we're only showing members who allow their street address and postcode/zipcode to be shown on their profile.

The Geocoding was done from an open, non-commercial database of the first part of people's UK postcodes or US Zipcodes. They can then fine tune this.

The infowindow popups contain a link to their Ecademy Profile, Company web site and their main IM system, such as Skype. The Skype links are active and show their current status if they've enabled "Show my status on the web". I'm also using the latest Google Maps V2.x to show tooltips when you hover over an point.