Free Business idea #23: A Skype White Pages site. Mashed in with Google Maps. As the basis for a generic "About Me" system. that (with the members help) correlates Skype IDs with collections of data from all the other sites (Flickr, del.icio.us, etc, etc).

Why? Because Skype Search isn't good enough yet.

The Long Tail: What do people really want in music? :
# Airplay Charts: "Measure what people are being fed."
# Sales Charts: "Measure what people are eating from what they're being fed."
# Usage Charts: "Measure what, from the music people can listen to, they listen to the most."

Here's another few questions.
- What music are people creating?
- What music are people listening to live? (at concerts, bars, live performances)
- What music are people copying?
- What background music is being played at people? (in bars, restaurants, hotel foyers, shops)?
- What music is used as soundscapes in TV, film?

I really wish we could get some of the same metrics for books. The problem is that a book can't tell a computer that it's being read the way a piece of music can tell that it's being played.

And BTW. The whole "Music Genre" classification system is really screwed. It's ripe for tags. At which point see Last.FM.

Early in the summer, my son had a Bus-Headbutting incident when a local country bus pulled out of a side road to cross a main road without seeing him. The worst sort of SMIDSY accident. The bus was so close that he hit it straight and level, and was pole vaulted off the bike. Amazingly he was pretty much ok, but the bike is a right off.



The frame engine hangers shattered, the big frame weld on one side exploded and everything in front of the engine is destroyed.

So the challenge was to get him back on the road cheaply. By chance we came across an old work colleague of mine who had the same model CBR400RR growing spiders, mould and rust in his garage. It hadn't moved in 7 years after a couple of small accidents and being knocked over while parked. So this summer we've been resurrecting it.



Doesn't that matt black look good? Perhaps the biggest hassle in all this was cleaning the inside of the tank. The petrol remains were turning to varnish and took an awful lot of degreaser and washing out. The fork seals were quite a challenge. And of course there were loads of japanese fasteners that were turning to cheese. But in the end it's quite a result. With the good carbs from the old bike along with the fuel supply bits, it started straight up without even changing the plugs. And as far as I can tell it's not using much oil and revs out nicely (ahem!) once we added the Japanese derestrictor black box.

Now, does anyone need some old CBR400RR bits?

Marc points at l.m. orchard : Talking about the problems of creating the same profile data over and over again on social networking sites.

Here's the crucial part. But since then, I just haven't felt the need to replicate self-disclosure anywhere else but on my own site. We need both ends of this. We need the social networks to be able to import the data. But we also need the personal blog software to support an "About Me" page that maintains and publishes the master copy. There continue to be major challenges around this area.

- Master "About Me" page, with export, in common personal software
- Standards for either a schema to describe people or ways of building it on the fly
- Standards for transferring that data
- Implementation of account creation using profile data from elsewhere
- Ways of keeping everything in sync.

And this all raises questions of exactly where the data should reside. The sync problem suggests it should never move and stay on the master site. We'll just include it at run time. But that works against being able to generate added value from having lots of that data in one place. And there are commercial pressures pushing sites towards keeping their local copy.

Now you may say "we have standards". But right now they're all flawed and there's too many of them. FOAF, VCard, HCard, XFN, SXIP.

AllPeers is a BitTorrent based peer to peer file sharing app written as a Firefox extension. It's just hit limited Beta and I have invitations available. Drop me a line if you want one.

julian_bond at voidstar.com

Hair gel and iPods terror alert.
Supreme court finds warrant-less wire tapping unconstitutional.

Craig Murray seems to be off line. Or at least I can't get to the blog. Did it get Slashdotted/Dugg? UKPoliblog seems to still be picking up the RSS.

www.myspace.com/rizmc
Do the 911 dance [from: del.icio.us]

Looking at the cartoon below, I think it should be remixed with the text just slightly changed but the images taken from an engraving of the founding fathers. Or is that too ironic?

Ah yes. Almost British in it's sense of humour. And carrying an undercurrent of Truthiness. I mean, you gotta larf, right?



More seriously, keep racheting up the pain of airline travel and we'll solve global warming. Because you just know that the current regime is the new normal. They're never going to be able to chill out and stop worrying. So I guess that's it. No more Web 2.0 conferences in SilliValley for me.

So can you carry on supplies of Nicorette gum because I don't think I could survive a transatlantic flight without it along with a good book to read. Hmm. Foil packed squares of gum. Just right for my new plastic explosive. And how about ear plugs? Or my blow up travel pillow?

For the fourth time today I find myself saying "Just stop it guys, you're being stupid. It's not big and it's not clever. It's just stupid. Just stop it."

It's apparently time to wheel these out again.



Populace: How worried should we be?
Government: Very, very worried. But just try to carry on as normal.

The Observer Via Kim Cameron's Identity Weblog » Tales from beyond the crypt : Gordon Brown is planning a massive expansion of the ID cards project that would widen surveillance of everyday life by allowing high-street businesses to share confidential information with police databases.

Far from intending to dump ID cards once he is in Downing Street, Brown is quietly studying how biometric technology - identifying people by unique markers such as fingerprints and iris patterns - could be expanded over the next 20 years to fight crime.

Police could be alerted instantly when a wanted person used a cash machine or supermarket loyalty card. Cars could be fingerprint-activated, making driving bans much harder to disobey.

The plan would make the ID cards scheme cheaper, since companies would pay for access to the national identity register - a government database of biometric information being compiled for the ID cards programme. Brown's plans belie reports that the Treasury, concerned about the cost of ID cards, would ditch them when he became Prime Minister. It's almost the opposite - Gordon's thinking about ID cards is that it's part of the answer but there's a much wider picture, said a source close to him.

I hesitate to suggest this, but what's dropping out of this is that the government needs to do nothing more than enact a couple of laws. The one's that say that any corporate ID / tracking system must include a backdoor that provides access to law enforcement and that any unusual transactions (volume or size) are automatically reported in near real time. That way they can avoid all the costs and maintenance issues.

In some jurisdictions, actually passing the laws is optional. The government just has to ask nicely and the corporations (I'm looking at you AT&T) willingly hand over the data.

BTW. What is it about Social Security numbers? You have to hand them out frequently to people who can barely be trusted (like your employer) So what's the big deal? Aren't they pretty much something like a Bank account number that is useless in isolation?

First the story. Last weekend I went to a party given by an old friend. I know his taste in music is thin and poor but I also know that he's got a seriously high end stereo, DVD, TV system. So I took my trusty hacked 80Gb Zen Xtra with the 65Gb of music along with assorted leads. The one lead I didn't take was a 3.5mm jack to phono and anyway trying to find spare phono inputs in the back of his fitted mega-stereo was a pain. Aha, I thought, I'll use the mini FM transmitter out of the car. Except that his tuner is DAB and it doesn't have a plain old VHF-FM section. And anyway the antenna is in the roof space and is a high gain directional item.

The second story is Ford. The new shape Focus (and others) came with a new shape radio that had a CD Jukebox connector but they never actually made the jukebox. They haven't sold enough of them for any of the CD Jukebox to iPod people to produce a convertor. One year in, they changed it to one with an Aux connector but didn't actually wire in the Aux socket. Finally, they are now putting Aux sockets in the glovebox. The radio being a new shape requires much fiddling with new tools to extract and replace. And I'm trying to track down a cheap late model Ford radio to replace my early one.

And the moral of all this is. MP3 players are now everywhere. Which means that every sound device (radios, stereos, ICE, boomboxes, PCs) should come with an AUX IN 3.5mm jack socket on the front of the box. By all means add an iPod specific adapter, but please put in the 3.5mm jack as well. So why don't they?

And while we're at it. Please put headphone jacks in cars for the passengers[1].

[1]Is it illegal in the UK to wear earphones while driving? Never mind if it's sensible or not, is it illegal?

Martin Geddes writes. Skype Journal: From little seeds do great ideas grow : True or false? You decide.

There will be three desktop clients through which you conduct your life. Browser wars ("Episode 1" ... or was that 4?) was only the beginning.

* The browser. "Their stuff" -- your lens on the outside world -- discover, read, and transact.
* The messenger. "Our stuff" -- your lens into your social world -- connect and converse.
* The manager. "My stuff" -- your lens onto your own digital artifacts -- search, edit and view.

Look at it from your point of view.
- Read
- Communicate
- Create
- Profile

Now look at it from "Their" point of view.
- Create
- Communicate
- Read
- Discover

It's useful to do One-Few-Many analysis on this. One-Few-Many publishers reaching One-Few-Many consumers. Skype is mostly One-To-One with some Few-To-Few and One-To-Many aspects.

There's a piece of this puzzle that is missing and that's publishing your profile; A public About Me page. All the portals are focussed on collecting everything you might read in one place. The "My Page". Nobody focusses on the reverse, collecting everything I create in one place *for other people* to read about me.

InformationWeek | DRM | Opinion: Apple's Copy-Protection Isn't Just Bad For Consumers, It's Bad For Business | July 26, 2006
Another great Anti-DRM rant from Cory. [from: del.icio.us]

I've just been playing with last.fm again. It's had another revamp and is getting seriously good. If you've been there and drifted away, look again. If you've never been, go now.

Currently listening to a composite tag radio station Called "Cocktails at Sunset".

We'll be doing a Skypecast of the Ecademy event again tonight.

Details here. Starting at 7:30 London time. [from: JB Ecademy]

Gliffy.com - Create and share diagrams online.
Web 2.0 flowchart and Diagramming site [from: del.icio.us]

wiki/NakedSkype - Skype Developer Zone is a page for speccing what a naked skype interface would look like. Naked Skype means a library that can interact with the skype network without generating any client UI. It may or may not require a full client install.

On the subject of Reverse engineering keeping Skype honest, I found this on the Skype API forum.

forum.skype.com :: View topic - Please release your API before it becomes public underground : "When business forget they are a business, they go out of business."

For those of you that are not running a business with stiff competition, or trying to meet release deadlines, or make a profit, or SURVIVE, then you can afford to be patient.

By the time you guys are done reading this thread and asking Skype for an API, I have used JAJAH OPEN API to create a running CALL BACK FEATURE in less than one day. Fully transparent, works perfect, done.

Like many I suppose, Ill wait until the NAKED SKYPE API becomes available, or until the Chinese version becomes downloadable on IRC or for sale. If Skype does not care about protecting their supernode network by releasing a legit version, how can they expect their developers too? Developers can not to proceed with VOIP enabled software with this current API.

Some of you may think I am rude, or abrupt, but lets face it, I am the face of business, the path of least resistance.

Also, for your consideration:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2005/12/17/google-talk-puts-gun-to-skypes-head/

and

http://www.skypejournal.com/blog/archives/yet_more_technology_topics/products/skype_api/

and strait from GOOGLE I give you:

http://www.google.com/talk/developer.html

At which point I just repeat myself. If LibJingle is going to open up IM, where's the code that uses it?

Here's some ways to think about this. The first point is to understand what interop means. There are 3 ways of linking IM/Audio/Video networks.
1) At the network level. Transparently route chat, voice and video by linking the networks. Skype can't do that because there is no central network. MSN, YM! and AIM have a big centrally controlled part of the system even though a lot of the communication is P2P so they can, at the cost of running that big central system.
2) At the server level. This is what some Jabber servers do. Because all comms go partly through a server they can be switched. It's the same as 1) except that anyone can run a jabber server.
3) At the client. GAIM, Trillian and others let you have one client that speaks multiple protocols. You need an official account with any system you want to talk to but it blurs the differences between them.

So if there's a library that can be built into cient code that duplicates the Skype protocols, 3) can be built. And 2) can be built where it's appropriate (eg Asterix PBX)

Then look at two conversations that are happening on the Skype forums already. Building audio/video stream access into the Skype API and release of a Naked Skype which is a library that provides the API without having to have the Client.

So if you can reverse engineer the protocol, there's no point in trying to build a better Skype client when Skype are shipping a new one every 2 months. You're just getting involved in a code race. If you can produce a naked skype API library with more capability, you can fill in the holes that Skype can't address. This might be something like a Linux version or a Nokia Series 60/80 version or a Skype that runs on a Linksys Wifi router. But again you're up against a potential code race. By producing something, you'll identify a market for Skype who will then produce it or bolt your new capability into their next release.

So we can begin to see that Skype don't need to open the protocol. What they do need to do is to make that protocol widely available in forms people want. Which means a naked Skype library with full access to chat, voice and video. And a friendly licensing regime to go with it. Then we can have Skype in GAIM/Trillian, 3rd party Skype-SIP gateways, Skype on weird platforms and so on.

A note about Security. If Skype have built their encryption properly (and I believe they have), then exposing the code and protocol will make *NO* difference to the strength of the encryption. Which means that if the USA/UK require backdoors for government access they're out of luck. if Skype put a backdoor in, the 3rd parties will produce a version with no backdoor. So I think this announcement of reverse engineering the protocol will keep Skype honest and keep the governments out. At least for Skype to Skype conversations even though Skype to POTS will still be at risk because you can always tap the POTS interconnection.

So all in all I see this as doing nothing more than providing a spur to Skype to keep writing code, building innovation and shipping it. As long as they keep doing that, there's no stopping them, and no downside for the users. And the fact that the protocol is reverse engineered will make no difference.

Now look at that idea of a naked API library. This is exactly the unfulfilled promise of LibJingle. Skype have had 9 months now to replicate it. I think they'll ship something before there's any use of LibJingle outside the official GTalk client.